by Thomas Abshier | May 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Bird, Babylon, and the Christian Underground: Strategies for Establishing a Christian Presence in a Captured Order
Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 10, 2026
Occasion: Sunday’s gathering had last week’s fellowship summary as its formal seed text, which was downstream of three weeks of fellowship work — the eight-strongholds essay of late April, the May 3 discussion of evangelism’s real deliverable, and a sequence of fellowship essays I have produced this past week engaging external pieces (Stephen Grosz on psychoanalysis, Charles Whitaker on proselytism, Justin Brown on the loneliness of being liked but never known, John Ritenbaugh on the harmony of grace and law). The Sunday meeting was largely unscripted — Michael Sherman opened with a walkthrough of his lifelong classification mandala at NowAll.us, Isak Gutierrez asked the question that organized the first half of the conversation (where do Christians and non-believers find common ground), and the second half opened into a deeper question that the fellowship has been circling for some time: how does a faithful Christian community live, as a community, inside a political and ecclesial order that has been comprehensively captured by forces hostile to the gospel? Three different answers surfaced — Susan Gutierrez’s separationism rooted in Come out of Babylon, Charlie Gutierrez’s live-like-a-bird approach, and my own preference for a de facto colony — and the discussion converged on a single name for what we were reaching toward, supplied by Charlie at the end: the Christian Underground.
What follows is the synthesis of what we said. The hour was longer than the discussion will feel in this writeup, partly because some threads opened and did not close, and partly because the disagreements were sharper than they appeared in the moment. I have tried to render each participant’s position fairly, including my own, and to flag the threads that remain open.
I. The Mandala — Michael Sherman’s Classification System
Michael opened by walking me through the current state of his classification system at NowAll.us, which sits under the Contact Us tab on the site he has been building for the better part of three decades. The image is a modified yin-yang: at the top is You, at the bottom is All, and the right and left halves are not single fields but each divided into an inbound and outbound quarter, because Michael long ago concluded that the interaction zone between any two terms is structurally rich enough to deserve its own subdivisions.
The right half of the wheel runs from the personal at one extreme — psychology, the where are you coming from of the individual — out to the macroeconomic at the other — the conditions you mostly inherit from the desert or the Eskimo community or the century you happen to live in. In between sit sociology, anthropology, and the institutional middle layer. Civilization runs through the green cells. Cultures, governments, and economies are the three principal slices. Each is further divided into an inner (individual-facing) and outer (anthropological-facing) face, with a sociological convening zone in the middle. Politics, institutions, and history are arranged as future, present, and past — the Declaration of Independence, Michael noted, can be filed under politics if what you are studying is Jefferson’s thinking as he wrote it, or under history if what you are studying is the artifact after the fact. The micro/macro split applies to economics in the same way it applies to physics. The left half of the wheel runs from biology (the most personal of the sciences) out to mathematics and the abstract models that don’t even have to be instantiated. Where biology meets math, you get the world of matter and energy.
The numeric scheme makes the right and left halves indexable: the 100s are the arts, the 300s are the sciences, the 200s are everything that runs through the civilizational middle. Sub-decimals locate any individual concept inside the cell where its innermost nature lives. The classification rule, Michael said, came to him from Marcus Aurelius: Who is it? What is it in and of itself? What is its nature? Once you can answer the what is its nature question for a concept, you know where in the wheel it goes.
I asked Michael to send me a copy. I have my own indexing problem on the Renaissance Ministries side — the Christos AI corpus is growing faster than my ad hoc folder structure can absorb — and Michael’s wheel is the engineered version of what I have been making up as I go. I will return to it when the time comes to re-organize the website. The mandala is also, as it was on May 3, the engineering version of Michael’s evangelistic method: find the cell where you and your interlocutor already overlap, and start there. That method is going to do real work in the next several sections of this summary.
II. The Question — Where Christians and Non-Believers Overlap
After Michael’s walkthrough, I asked the group whether anyone had read last week’s fellowship essay. Isak said he had started it. Then he asked Michael the question that organized the rest of the morning:
What are the things, as an atheist or a non-believer, that overlap with Christianity and your beliefs? Where do you tend to agree, and where do you tend not to?
Isak’s framing was honest about his own history. He has, by his own account, lived his life as different versions of those positions — Christian, atheist, seeker — at different times. The question was not academic. He was asking for an inventory of shared ground from someone who has thought about it for as long as Michael has.
Michael’s first answer to the overlap question was the right one. He reached, with help from the group, for the verse Susan had once supplied: By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). The overlap, at the foundation, is love for one another — and the practical instances of it across two millennia of Christian witness are not difficult to find. Michael named Mother Teresa, and the broader tradition of Christian charity that produced her. He named John Paul II, standing up to the Soviet bloc in Poland during the 1980s, not only the political capital to do it, but also the courage. He named the long list of Christian humanitarian work that, when Christianity is at its best, manifests precisely the kind of outgoing concern for others that is the substance of the gospel.
There is a great deal of overlap at this level, Michael said, and he was clear that the overlap is real, not a strategic concession. The agreements between his position and Christianity are substantial — forgiveness, the Decalogue at its core, the Sermon on the Mount, 1 Corinthians 13:11. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. The overlap between stated convictions and lived ethical practice is broad enough to support substantial cooperation.
III. The Indictment — Michael on Christianity in History
The disagreements, however, were many. Michael offered them not as a sneer but as someone who has spent decades trying to make sense of what the historical record actually shows, and the catalog he produced is the catalog every honest Christian apologist will eventually have to face.
He began with the Spanish Inquisition — not just the killings, but the deliberate elaboration of pain over time. The Iron Maiden, with its spikes arranged to crush the body slowly. The breaking wheel, on which a person’s limbs were shattered, and the body was then elevated so birds and ants could complete what the wheel had begun. Honey was applied to draw the insects. The point of the technologies, Michael emphasized, was not death but the extension of dying. These things were not improvised in some basement; rather, they were specified, engineered, manufactured, installed in cathedrals, and used by inquisitorial courts.
Michael’s assessment was, “It’s as if they looked at the cross and the crucifixion and carried on. And said, “You know what, this is the good stuff. Let’s all wear this around our neck, and let’s all torture people just like this.” He did not say it as polemic. He said it as the honest perception of someone watching the historical record and noting that the practitioners of the inquisitorial torture seem not to have noticed what their central symbol depicted. The cross, in its biblical meaning, is the place where the innocent absorbs the violence of the guilty. The inquisitorial cross is the same instrument used to prolong the accused’s suffering. Something has gone radically wrong when those two are confused.
Michael’s catalog continued past the Inquisition. The Crusades. The Bosnian War of the 1990s, in which Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians arranged themselves into three armies and killed each other for territory in a region every faction claimed for God. The Spanish Conquest of the Americas, in which the genocide of indigenous peoples was conducted explicitly as a Christianization mission. The pattern Michael named was that the banner of God has been carried, again and again, by armies committed to ends the gospel never authorized.
He turned to a contemporary remedy he finds promising. A student of his, now a professor at New York University, has built a career convening religious leaders on all sides of an active conflict and brokering conversations among them. During his college years, the student traveled to Sri Lanka and gathered peace stories from each of the four major religions then warring on the island, and then published the collection in all four languages. The project assumes that one cannot expect the warring generations to make peace with each other, but one can sometimes raise the next generation to recognize that each tradition, somewhere in its archive, contains stories of the peace it has lost. Michael named the existence of formal Interfaith Council bodies that operate on the same premise. On Michael’s account, the Interfaith Council is a real and useful institution.
IV. Isak’s Diagnosis — Religion as Cover for Other Motives
Isak, after listening to Michael’s catalog, offered a diagnosis. He suggested that the wars Michael describes are, on close inspection, not really about religion. They are about land, resources, captured populations, dynastic ambition, and the desire of small groups of decision-makers to manufacture consent for war from larger populations that would otherwise not have agreed. It’s not a war by the people, Isak said. It’s a war by some people who decided that’s the route we have to go to create propaganda or a narrative. The religion functions as the propaganda layer — the cover that makes the actual war seem to the foot soldier like a war he can join with a clear conscience.
If wars were really about religion, Isak observed, they would have ended whenever the religious leaders sat down together and identified their shared commitments. But they do not end at that table, because that is not actually what the wars are about. Michael agreed in full: Oh, I agree 100%. Excellent. Well put.
This was a moment of substantive convergence between Isak’s diagnostic instinct and Michael’s historical analysis, and the conversation could have closed at this point with everyone in agreement that the indictment Michael had raised is real and that its proximate cause is the human use of religion as cover for non-religious ambitions. The complication, which I raised next, was whether that observation — that religion is being misused — is itself a sufficient diagnosis, or whether the religion is also doing something that makes the misuse easier.
V. The Distinction Defense — Christianity Versus Its Distortions
I made the distinction-defense at this point. The actions Michael had cataloged — Inquisition, Crusades, conquistador genocide, Bosnia — are not what Christianity teaches. They are what people who claim Christianity have done. The doctrine and the doings are not the same thing, and conflating them is the same kind of error as conflating chemistry with the chemists who built the gas chambers. It is poorly executed Christianity that is being indicted, not Christianity. It says what those particular Christians did. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what poorly executed Christianity does.
Michael’s pushback was that Christianity inspires Christians to join the cause. The Spanish Conquest was sold to its soldiers as, “We are going to Christianize the natives.” The translation of that recruiting pitch in the field was the wiping out of whole tribes and the enslavement of those who were not killed. The point, Michael said, is that the religion does the recruiting work. The leaders cite it; the foot soldiers join because they are told the cause is righteous; the misuse is enabled by the texture of religion itself. It is the nature of religion to bind salvation to membership, its history of crusading rhetoric, its production of priests and popes who can authorize the war and absolve its consequences.
Note: The use of the texture of religion by the priesthood or government to motivate action in the name of a group is not an indictment of the truth of that religion. In particular, the truth of Christianity is not determined by the pretexts used by governments, missionaries, popes, expeditionary forces, or crusaders. Rather, this widely referenced and exemplified history of the misuse and misdirection of action and zeal in the name/aegis of religion is a testament to religion’s power to enlist human thought, emotions, and action. The fact of such power is a cautionary note for those who hear the appeals of religion. It is likewise a warning to those tempted to use that power to as the motivator for their program (whether commercial (consumption/profit-driven), governmental (state compliance), personal (cult-like obedience), inspire of the great responsibility*** of the be used correctly/rightly, lest the naive, the immature, the unsophisticated be enrolled in unrighteous action in their misguided attempt to execute righteousness. The true indictment is of the practitioners, populations, and leaders who follow blindly or cynically/maliciously misuse the inherent power of religion to motivate man toward God’s manifestation of His Kingdom.
I consider Michael’s argument against Christianity based upon this historical precedent of misuse and misapplication of the core principles/philosophy/theology/teaching of religion to be in the same class of misunderstanding of religion as those who have misapplied it in the application of the horrors of the iron maiden and the wheel. I believe it is this error, and errors in its orbit, to be one of the strongest (albeit weak) and most commonly used (indicating the lack of sophistication and discrimination of the intelligentsia/leader/power-class). This error is The error is in the But He is not naively confusing the religion with its misuse. He is saying that any religion that can be so reliably weaponized must, in some sense, be vulnerable to weaponization at its structural level — and that the proper Christian response to the historical record is not the distinction-defense alone, but the harder question of why the distinction has historically failed to hold, and what would need to change for the distinction to do real work.
I did not concede the full structural form of his argument, because I do not think the religion’s vulnerability to weaponization is the same as a defect in the religion itself. But I want to record the argument’s strength here, because the fellowship’s project — building the Kingdom Culture, the Christos Civitas, what Charlie at the end of the morning would name the Christian Underground — has to be a Christianity that is not vulnerable to that weaponization. The distinction-defense alone is not enough. The lived community has to make the distinction true.
VI. The Islam Exchange
The conversation then took a sharper turn — sharper than it perhaps needed to — into Islam. I said something I will repeat here for the record, and I will also note that Michael’s challenge to it was substantive enough that I cannot resolve the exchange in the writeup. I said that the comparison between Christianity and Islam, on the question of whether either is a religion of peace, is not symmetric. Islam was founded in war, expanded by conquest, and continues — in the sense that its core scriptures and its dominant historical practice both authorize it — to be a religion that converts at the point of the sword. The George W. Bush–era assurance to the American public that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace is, I argued, not historically accurate. The Crusades were a defensive response to seven centuries of Islamic conquest that had taken Iberia, the Levant, North Africa, and much of southeastern Europe. Without the Crusades the conquest would have continued into the rest of Europe.
Michael’s response was the right response: a Muslim would say exactly what I had just said, only with the words Christianity and Islam exchanged. He asked me to produce the scriptural citations that demonstrate Islam’s authorization of forcible conversion. I told him I could not produce them from memory, because I am not a Qur’anic scholar, but that I had read the citations many times and would be willing to gather them. (That offer stands, and I will gather them this week. To be filed as an open thread.)
I distinguished, in the meantime, the Meccan and Medinan periods of Muhammad’s career — the earlier Meccan period being the one from which Western apologists most often draw their religion of peace characterizations, and the later Medinan period being the one in which the political-military character of the movement was established. The dominant Islamic legal tradition, I said, treats the Medinan revelations as superseding where they conflict with the Meccan. This is doctrine I have read but not studied to the level Michael was asking for.
Michael’s counter was to introduce the Jewish historical experience as a comparative datum, since the Jewish people have lived under both Christian and Islamic rule at various points and have, in some places, kept records of how each regime treated them. He cited the period of Islamic rule over portions of Iberia as a time when Jews were taxed but not persecuted, and the period of the Spanish Inquisition that followed the Christian Reconquista as the time when Jews were tortured and expelled. The example by itself is real. The generalization Michael drew from it — that Christians have historically killed Jews while Muslims have historically tolerated them — is, I argued, too quick. A single example is not a generalization. There are other examples that run the other way. The Holocaust is one. The expulsion of Jews from Arab lands in 1948 and after is another. The history of the dhimmi status, which subordinated Jewish communities to Muslim rule under conditions that were tolerable when the rulers were generous and severe when they were not, is a third. The honest comparative-history answer is that Jews have fared variably under both regimes, and that the variability tracks the disposition of the local rulers more than the underlying religion.
We did not resolve the exchange. I am willing to say that the comparative-history question is more contested than I initially framed it. I am not willing to concede the larger claim that Islam and Christianity are equivalently disposed toward forcible conversion, because I do not think the textual and historical records support that equivalence. But the matter is open, and I owe the fellowship the citations I was unable to produce on the spot.
VII. Hitler, the Pope, and the Failure of Christians to Stand Up
Michael then pressed the question further by introducing the Holocaust. Hitler’s Germany, he noted, was a Christian nation by any external measure — culturally, demographically, even formally in many of its church-state arrangements — and the response of the Christian church to the gas chambers was not to stand against them. Some clergy did stand. Most did not. The Pope did not, in any way commensurate with what was happening. The German Protestant church, with the Barmen Declaration exception, did not. The wider European Christian populations, in occupied France and Belgium and Poland, did not, with the exception of pockets of resistance and the moral exceptions like Bonhoeffer who paid for their resistance with their lives.
Michael invoked a line from John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman on this point — the line is roughly that the issue was not that Hitler had the power to be so evil, but that millions had not the strength to stand against him. The Christian failure of the 1930s and 1940s, on Michael’s reading, was not that Christianity caused the gas chambers, but that Christianity did not produce the resistance that the moment required. The pope who could have said no — and said it with the moral authority of the Catholic Church behind him — did not say no. He acquiesced. And the consequence of the acquiescence, in Michael’s framing, was that the Church watched the genocide happen.
I made the distinction-defense again, more carefully this time. It does not say what Christianity does. It says what those particular Christians did. It says what poorly executed Christianity does. Michael’s response was the response that has stayed with me most from the whole morning. He said: that is exactly the project you are trying to undertake — the project of producing a Christianity that does not boot-lick whoever claims to be Christian and is in power, but actually stands. The task is large. It has historical precedent against it. But it is precisely the right task, and if you can pull it off, you will have added a chapter to the Christian story that the previous chapters needed.
That was a moment of substantive endorsement from Michael that I want to record. He does not believe Christianity has, as historically practiced, been what it claims to be. He does believe the version of Christianity I am trying to build with this fellowship could be — and he is, on the evidence of the morning, willing to support the attempt. Why I say go for it, he said. Which is why I’m kind of hoping you can pull this off, because what you just said needs to happen if Christianity is going to have the soul of its essence become what it stands for, instead of, you know, boot-licking whoever says he’s Christian.
VIII. Institutions, Hierarchy, and the Uninformed Middle
The conversation transitioned, through my own use of the word institutions, into the question of how religious and political institutions actually function and whether their failures convict the underlying systems or only the particular institutional inhabitants. I had used institution to mean the perversion of an ideal that has become the public voice of the ideal — the bishop conference that has become what Catholicism says, the news anchor who has become what journalism is, the academic department that has become what the discipline thinks. Michael clarified that he had been using institution differently in the mandala: not as a perversion of an ideal but as the present-tense layer of social reality, between the future-oriented activity of politics and the past-oriented recording of history. The institution, on Michael’s framing, is the way things presently are; it is changeable, and the change is what politics and history both register.
We disagreed about hierarchy. I made the claim that every organization with a leadership structure is, in its operational moment, a top-down system — that even when there is a populist vote at the front end, what follows is a bureaucratic machinery that executes the will of the leadership. Michael pushed back hard. Western constitutional democracy, he said, is not top-down in any straightforward sense. The president faces a Congress made of a Senate and a House, both of which can refuse him. The British Prime Minister faces the Commons and Lords. The German Chancellor faces the parliament. The separation of powers is the principal mechanism by which the one big leader runs everything model is checked. He used the image of superheroes with different powers — the President fast, the Senate strong, the House numerous, the judiciary precise — fighting on different fields rather than head-to-head for a single prize.
I came around partway. The separation-of-powers structure is real, and it does produce something more complex than a single Goliath. But I am not persuaded that the complexity rescues the model from the deeper problem, which is that the population doing the voting is, in significant part, uninformed and is voting on grounds that are not adequate to the seriousness of the decisions being made. Michael did not deny the uninformedness. He invoked Mark Twain — the Lord must have liked the common folk, because he made so many of us — and offered as illustration the 1988 Democratic primary turning on the phrase where’s the beef?, and the 1952 Eisenhower campaign cartoons, with their elephants and balloons, that helped carry the general election. The uninformed middle decides elections by responding to memes and slogans rather than by deliberation on substance.
That is the dynamic. Michael did not defend it; he described it. And the description, taken seriously, is corrosive of any easy democratic faith. If the institution-electing population is choosing on this basis, then the institutions it produces are likely to be of the same kind. The Pope, Michael conceded, has been on both sides of the moral ledger across the centuries — the John XXIII / John Paul II / Francis side, and the Galileo / Hitler-acquiescent side. We did not settle whether the variability of the institutional output convicts the underlying institution. I do not think we will settle that question soon. It is the same question, in another form, that we are asking about Christianity itself.
Michael left the meeting at this point, with the standing observation that the issues we had covered were the issues he thinks about all the time and that the conversation had been generative for him. The fellowship continued without him.
IX. After Michael’s Departure — Isak on Not Being Tricked
Isak offered the first reflection after Michael left. The thing he heard in Michael’s whole presentation, he said, was the desire not to be tricked — and that desire is the same desire that drives a lot of serious Christians, and a lot of serious seekers, in any tradition. People who think for themselves do not want to find out, ten years in, that they have been moved by sleight of hand. The fear that the religion is doing that to them is the fear that produces the rogue Christian posture Isak has had to come to terms with in himself. He does not, by his own account, want a Pope above him, or a denominational leader who can speak for his conscience, or a creedal authority that can pre-empt his own discernment. He wants to know God for himself, and he wants what he calls the actual relationship, not the relationship the religion has packaged for him to consume.
This concern was, I think, the most personally serious thing said during the morning. It is also a concern the fellowship has to take seriously as we try to build something. Whatever the Christian Underground turns out to be, it cannot be a trick. The people who join it have to do so with their eyes open, and the structure has to be the kind of structure that does not require its members to suspend their discernment in order to belong. The historical Christianity Michael indicted has, very often, required exactly that suspension. The Christianity we are trying to build has to be one that produces deepened discernment, not surrender of it.
Leonard interjected at this point with a recommendation of the film Idiocracy — the satirical Mike Judge picture from 2006 about a society that, over five centuries, becomes catastrophically less intelligent because the educated have stopped reproducing while the uneducated have not. Isak elaborated the premise. The film’s opening contrast — the educated couple who will have children when the time is right, juxtaposed against the unprovident pair whose descendants multiply uncontrollably — is, Leonard said, a parable for the demographic gradient our actual civilization is now riding. It is funny, and it is unfunny.
X. Leonard’s Bird and the Two Strategies
The film cue led Leonard into the metaphor that organized the rest of the morning. He said: Michael is an observer of the game, not a player. The game itself, Leonard said, is being played by what the gaming world calls NPCs — non-player characters, controlled by the game rather than playing it. The game is a single bird with two wings: one left, one right, both attached to the same body, both flapping in the same direction. The wings appear to disagree; the bird does not. The bird is going wherever the bird is going, and the NPC voters who choose between the wings each cycle are, in effect, choosing nothing about the destination.
I named what Leonard was describing as the uniparty critique — the analysis, common on the dissident right and on parts of the dissident left, that the apparent contest between Republicans and Democrats is a contest within a single political class with substantially convergent commitments on the matters that most affect the population. Leonard agreed. The bird is, on his picture, headed toward the precipice that 250-year-old empires conventionally reach. The American Republic is at or past that mark. The end is either external conquest or internal disintegration. Leonard quoted the enemies foreign and domestic phrase from the constitutional oath, and observed — pointedly — that the domestic enemies are the more proximate threat.
I said something that should not have been compressed into a single line, but it was: in the language of the bird metaphor, the domestic enemies are the Democrats — and I meant by this not the millions of ordinary Democratic voters, who are largely the uninformed middle Michael had described, but the leadership and machinery of the Democratic Party, which has, over the past three decades, allied itself with the cultural and institutional forces I take to be most directly hostile to the gospel. Leonard agreed and added the necessary correction: there are a lot of Republicans that are Democrats too. The party label is not the operative variable; the underlying alignment is. The Republicans In Name Only — the RINOs — count, on this analysis, as part of the same wing of the same bird.
Two strategies for the right-wing problem then surfaced. Leonard’s strategy was to pull the right wing off the bird entirely and attach it instead to the cross of Christ — a posture of separation from the political process altogether, on the conviction that the bird cannot be salvaged and that what the gospel asks is a different mode of existence. If you pull the wing off, Leonard noted, the bird crashes. The bird crashing is, on his picture, not the problem; it is the relief.
My strategy was different. I do not want to disengage. I want to dominate. The right wing — by which I mean the believing, traditional, scripturally-grounded portion of the population, the Moral Majority in Reagan-era language and the Kingdom Culture in our own — should not abandon the bird; it should beat its wing harder and faster than the left wing, and steer the bird’s flight toward an actual Christian civilization. The Christos Civitas project, as I have articulated it across the previous fellowship essays, is the affirmative version of this strategy: a Christian people building the political, ecclesial, and cultural institutions that will carry the next generation, won one soul at a time.
These two strategies — Leonard’s separation and mine of cultural dominance — are not, I now think, opposed in the way they first appeared. They are answers to the same question at different stages of the same project, and the synthesis that surfaced later in the morning (the Christian Underground) is the right name for what we are actually doing.
XI. Susan’s Counter-Direction — Come Out of Babylon
Susan, who had been listening through the bird-and-cross exchange, offered the deepest counter-direction of the morning. The Bible, she said, presses us toward something different than fixing the existing government from within. She had been reading widely in the come out from among them passages — Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you (2 Corinthians 6:17), and the parallel come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins (Revelation 18:4) — and she had concluded that the biblical prescription is more radical than either Leonard’s wing-amputation or my cultural-dominance strategy.
What Susan saw is that the corruption is not concentrated in one wing or one party. It is structural to the man-made governmental order itself, in such a way that even a corrected version of that order would be subject to the same gravitational drag. The man-made laws, even the good ones, are bound up with bad ones in package deals — the legislative process cannot deliver pure goods because the institution itself is impure. The way the Bible proposes, Susan said, is not to refine the bird but to step off it onto a different platform entirely, and to let the alternative platform become visible to the rest of the population as a competing option. Once a real alternative is visible, the monopoly the man-made government has on the spiritual imagination of its citizens is broken. Some people will, then, choose the alternative. The fruits of the Spirit, which are presently muted in the Christian community by the entanglement with the unbelieving order, will become visible — and the visibility itself will draw the remainder of the population that is still drawable.
Susan’s framing is biblically rooted in a way that I have to respect, even where I am not yet sure I agree with the strategic conclusion. The texts she invoked do say come out. They do say be separate. They do contemplate a faithful remnant inside but not of the order it lives in. The question is what coming out operationally looks like in 2026 America, and whether the coming out is a present-tense action or an eschatological hope that will be realized when the Beast system makes neutrality impossible. Susan, I think, was holding both. The action has to begin now while the cost is still bearable; the full separation will not be required until later, but by then the people who have not begun the work will not be ready for it.
XII. The Ambassador and the Testamentary Trust
Susan offered two specific mechanisms by which the coming out might be operationalized in current American legal structure. The first is the ambassador model. An ambassador to a foreign country is, by long-established diplomatic convention, not under the legal jurisdiction of the country in which she serves. She represents her sending country; she is taxed and disciplined and adjudicated by it; she is, in the receiving country, subject only to the limited protocols that apply to her diplomatic status. Susan’s proposal is that Christians can — and the New Testament directly authorizes the language for it — claim the status of ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20), and that the ambassadorial status, properly understood, places them under the jurisdiction of Christ’s kingdom rather than under the jurisdiction of the American legal order in which they currently live.
The mechanism is real, in the sense that the United States does recognize foreign ambassadors and accord them diplomatic immunity. The mechanism is also constrained, in the sense that the recognition has to come from the State Department and the President, and is generally not granted to citizens of the receiving country itself claiming foreign-sovereign status under a religious framework. Susan is, I think, hopeful that the current administration — given its religious orientation and its skepticism of the institutional consensus on church-state matters — might be open to recognizing a Christian-citizenship status that operates analogously to ambassadorial status. I cannot evaluate the legal feasibility of this. I do think the ambassador for Christ language in 2 Corinthians 5:20 is doing real theological work that the Christian community has not fully drawn out, and I want to take Susan’s proposal seriously enough to study it.
The second mechanism Susan offered is the testamentary-trust model. Within the New Testament, she has identified what she reads as a last will and testament of Jesus Christ — and within that testament, a testamentary trust into which the Father has transferred a class of persons (the given of John 17, thine they were, and thou gavest them me). The legal analogy Susan is reaching for is the modern testamentary trust, in which assets are protected by being held inside the trust rather than by the individual beneficiary, and which can — in some jurisdictions — extend its protection to the persons whose support is the trust’s purpose. The proposal is that Christians, by virtue of having been given to Christ by the Father, are inside a legal-spiritual structure that the man-made courts are theoretically obligated to recognize when correctly invoked. Susan acknowledges that the testamentary-trust mechanism has not been tested in court in this form; she also reads it as having real future potential, particularly if the current legal environment continues to be open to religiously-grounded jurisdictional claims.
Charlie’s response to Susan’s framing, partway through, was characteristic and warm: This is Dr. T telling you, in a very nice way, you’re completely delusional. I want to record that exchange because it captures the dynamic that produced the rest of the conversation. I am skeptical of Susan’s specific legal mechanisms. I do not think the ambassadorial framework or the testamentary-trust framework will be received by the American courts in the way Susan’s argument requires. But the substantive theological insight — that Christians belong, juridically, to a different sovereign than the one stamped on the currency — is biblically defensible, and the question of how that different sovereignty becomes practically visible is the right question. The answer may not be the specific legal mechanism Susan named, but it is in the neighborhood of what she was reaching for.
Susan’s response to my skepticism was, again, biblically grounded: when the way forward is not visible, the biblical pattern is to call a fast. Ezra called a fast in chapter 8. Nineveh called a fast in Jonah 3. The fellowship, she said, would do well to do the same. The way we cannot see may become visible when the fast is kept.
XIII. Charlie’s Third Way — Live Like a Bird
Charlie, who had been quiet through most of the morning, offered a third strategy that drew on a long personal history. The strategy is what I will call the live like a bird approach.
When he is at the ocean — Fort Funston, where he sometimes sits in the late afternoon after the crows and ravens are done with the day’s work and have come over to play in the updraft along the cliff — Charlie watches the seagulls and pelicans pass overhead in their irregular parade. They appear to him to live in a kind of freedom that he does not. The birds do not have to pay rent, hold a driver’s license, file taxes, or comply with the Lilliputian regulatory net that has been laid across the daily life of an American citizen. Their constraints are different — they have to avoid predators and find food — but those constraints are relatively simple and ancient, not the elaborate web of human-invented agreements that has been laid across Charlie’s path. I’m at least as smart as that Pelican, he said. The question he has been asking himself is what the Pelican is doing, or not doing, that keeps it free, and what Charlie himself has been doing that has tied him to the ground.
The answer he has settled on, partially, is this: refuse to enter into agreements with crazy people. Have as little contact with formal authority as can be managed. Stay out of the line of sight of the bureaucratic and ecclesial regimes that want to register, license, regulate, tax, and otherwise capture the citizen-believer. Live, deliberately, under the radar — what Paul Fussell, in his book Class, called the bottom out of sight, the social position in which one is invisible to the controllers because one has nothing they want to take and offers nothing they want to grant. Charlie has done this in measurable ways across his life. He did not register his children with the state when they were born. He homeschooled them outside the public school system. He has chosen freelance and low-overhead work over formal employment that would require him to be visible to the various intake systems. He has spent, by his own account, nine and a half months of his life across some eight to twelve different jails, having chosen to refuse cooperation with various manifestations of state authority that he judged to be illegitimate. He has, in the language of his metaphor, been trying to fly.
His method is also Christological, on his reading. I think what I’m describing is actually what Christ did, he said. Until the end of his ministry, when he chose to be entangled, Christ was, in fact, hard to catch — slipping away from crowds that wanted to take him, walking through synagogue mobs that meant to throw him off cliffs, answering questions in ways that left the questioners without traction. The freedom of the Son of Man on earth, in Charlie’s reading, was the freedom of someone who declined to grant authorities the power to determine his agenda. The crucifixion happened when Christ chose to allow it. Until that hour, the form of his life was the form of someone who lived around, not under, the regimes that wanted to control him.
XIV. The Critique and the Defense of Charlie’s Way
My critique of Charlie’s method, which I will rephrase here in the form it had after the morning’s debate, is that the method is workable for the individual but does not scale to the Bride. The two pure forms of the bottom out of sight and top out of sight positions Charlie referenced — the homeless and the Rothschilds — are not available to most of us. The middle position Charlie has constructed for himself, which is the under-the-radar life of someone who has chosen to be uninteresting to the controllers, is real and admirable, but it is not the form of a public Christian witness that will draw the next generation. The Church the Lord is preparing for his return is, by his own description, without spot or wrinkle — and the body of Christ does not become spotless by mass relocation to bottom-out-of-sight obscurity. It becomes spotless by a kind of present, visible, costly faithfulness that produces, over time, a public alternative to the controlling order. We cannot, as a Bride, be lukewarm and irrelevant. The lukewarm are spit out (Revelation 3:16). The light that is hidden under the bushel is wasted (Matthew 5:15).
Charlie’s defense, when I pressed him on this, was the most poignant moment of the morning. I want the freedom of the angel Gabriel, he said. It’s not really realistic right now. I’m bound by gravity and proximity to endless Karens, but I’m doing my best. The gap between the freedom he is reaching for and the freedom he is presently allowed is, he acknowledges, real. He is not claiming to have arrived at the bird’s life. He is claiming to be trying, and to be doing it better than he would be doing if he had instead chosen the head-to-head confrontation with state authority that has, in his earlier life, produced nine and a half months in jails without producing any visible change in the regimes he confronted.
I want to record that I take Charlie’s critique of the head-to-head approach seriously. He has the lived experience of having tried it. I have not been to jail for my convictions. The cost-benefit analysis he has performed across his lifetime has produced his current position, and the position is not pure dropping-out — he is, by being on the call this morning, by raising his children in the faith, by sustaining his marriage with Susan, by partnering with me on Ideomotion, doing public work that is visible and costly. The freedom-of-the-bird metaphor is what he is aiming at, not what he is claiming. The actual life he is leading is a middle path between full engagement and full retreat, and the middle path has real virtues that the two pure positions lack.
XV. Susan’s Eschatological Urgency
Susan, returning to the strategic question, raised the temporal dimension that I think the entire fellowship has to attend to. The American present, she said, is the period of relative ease. Charlie’s under-the-radar strategy works now because the controllers have not yet built the infrastructure of universal compliance that the book of Revelation describes them building. The mark of the Beast — whatever its specific operational form turns out to be — is the moment when the controllers’ grid becomes universal, mandatory, and unrefusable, and when the choice between the Beast and the Lamb becomes a public stand that cannot be evaded by being uninteresting. Right now is the time to stand up and say, okay, the we are for Christ, and Christ stands for this, this, this, this, and we are to really now, while things aren’t too hard, at least in this country, they aren’t too hard, we really would do best, and what Christ is asking us to do is stand up for and make him our only master, make him our only king. And I see in the Bible ways to do that.
The argument is that the under-the-radar strategy is non-renewable. It works in a regime that has not yet completed its surveillance, and it will not work in the regime the Beast system is in the process of building. The fellowship has, on Susan’s reading, a window. The work of organizing now — naming what we believe, identifying the people who are with us, building the alternative — is work that is much easier in the present window than it will be after the window closes. If we don’t do that right now, then we’re going to be in a position that’s a much weaker position when we actually have to do that.
I think Susan is right about this. The eschatological urgency she is raising is the variable that resolves the disagreement between Charlie’s method and mine. Charlie’s method works in the present. My method (cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas) is the work that has to be done before the present window closes. Both are operative; neither is the whole story; both have to be subordinated to the question of when the moment of public stand will come, and how to be ready for it.
XVI. The Synthesis — The Christian Underground
What surfaced, in the closing minutes of the meeting, was the synthesis. I think we found the right name for what we are trying to build.
The synthesis is this: Charlie’s under-the-radar method is the right tactical posture in the present window, and Susan’s come out of Babylon directive is the right structural posture for the long term, and my cultural dominance via the Christos Civitas is the right strategic posture for what we are building toward — but all three of them belong inside a single name, and the name is the Christian Underground. Charlie supplied the phrase. Leonard, in his characteristic register, offered the inverted form: the Christian overground. Both are correct. The Christian Underground is what the fellowship is building in the present, while the present window is open. The Christian Overground is what the Underground becomes when the time of public stand arrives and the Underground steps forward into visibility.
The Christian Underground is not a formal legal entity. It is not a new denomination. It is not a separatist commune. It is a network of believers who have made the same set of commitments — to obey God before man where the two conflict; to take their primary jurisdiction from Christ and not from the state; to build the alternative culture that will be ready to become visible when the moment of stand arrives; to bear witness in the present in the ways that are practicable in the present; and to support each other across the relational, economic, ecclesial, and political dimensions of life. The Christian Underground is what the early Church was before it had buildings. It is what the persecuted church has always been when the regime is hostile and the gathering is illegal. It is what we may yet become, in this country, when the present window closes.
The name is, I now think, the right name for what the Renaissance Ministries fellowship has been building all along. The CFE essays are the discourse of the Underground. The Christos Voting Network is the political layer of the Underground. The Ideomotion project is one operational outpost of the Underground. The Christos Home School is the formative layer. The fellowship gathering itself is the cell-meeting at the foundation. We have been building the Underground without having had a single word for it. Charlie gave us the word.
I take this as a real gift from the morning’s conversation. I will think on it, and I will bring it back to the next fellowship for the further work of articulating what the Underground is in more operational detail.
XVII. Susan’s Closing Call — Bible, Prayer, Fasting
Susan closed the substantive discussion with a call for direction-finding. Let us read the Bible with that in mind. What is the what is God telling us to do? Let’s examine with that question of, how do we go about, you know, organizing? How do we go about living according to what God is saying? And consult the Bible and see what we’re being told here. And instead of just going on our what we think is best, you know, what we — completely agree we absolutely want divine guidance, rather than human guidance and our own ideas. She suggested a fast. The biblical pattern is consistent — when the way forward is unclear, the people who are seeking the way fast and pray and search the scriptures for the indication of where to step next. I want to take this seriously. I propose that we agree, in the next fellowship gathering, on a coordinated fast of one or three days, during which we read the come out passages of both testaments together and bring to the next meeting what each of us has heard.
Susan closed the meeting in prayer.
XVIII. What Remains Open
A number of threads opened during the meeting and did not close. I want to record them so the fellowship can return to them.
First, the comparative-religion question — specifically the Christianity-Islam comparison — remains substantively open, and I owe Michael the citations I was unable to produce on the spot. I will gather them and circulate before the next fellowship.
Second, the Pope question — whether the historical failures of the papacy convict the office, the Church, or only the particular incumbents — was not resolved. The deeper version of the question is whether any institution that mediates between God and the believer is corrigible, and if not, what the alternative is. This connects to Isak’s I am one of those rogue Christians position, and to Susan’s come out framework, and to the whole question of whether the Underground we are building should have any clerical structure at all or whether it should be fully congregational. We will need to return to this.
Third, the practical question of how the Christian Underground operationalizes — what specifically a member of it does, day to day, that is different from what an ordinary believer in a typical evangelical congregation does — was named but not answered. The §6.2 question from the Ideomotion charter (what does the customer-to-fellowship pathway look like, operationally) is the same question in another register. We need an operational document for the Underground itself.
Fourth, Susan’s specific legal mechanisms — the ambassador framework and the testamentary-trust framework — need legal review before we adopt them as anything more than theological-imagery. Charlie was right that the as-stated mechanisms are not, in their current articulation, ready to be relied on in court. But the underlying theological commitments — that Christians belong juridically to a different sovereign, and that the present sovereignty of the state over the believer is contingent rather than absolute — are sound, and the operational form of those commitments needs work.
Fifth, the eschatological-timing question. Susan’s argument that the present window is closing has a certain urgency to it, but it is also the kind of argument that has been made by Christians for two thousand years without the predicted closure arriving. We need to think carefully about what specifically would constitute the closure of the window — what observable event would tell us the moment of public stand has arrived — so that we are not perpetually deferring the work on the grounds that the window has not yet closed, but also not prematurely declaring it closed and forcing a public stand for which we are not ready.
Sixth, the practical-organizational question of what the next steps for the Underground look like. We have a name. We do not yet have a charter, a covenant of membership, an admissions process, a discipline structure, or a relationship to the existing module structure of Renaissance Ministries. These will need to be drafted, deliberated, and adopted. The Christos Rigorous Framework (CRF), which Isak and I have been building separately, may be the right home for the formal articulation of what the Underground commits its members to.
Closing Reflection
I came into the Sunday meeting expecting to discuss the recent Forerunner essays I have been engaging — Whitaker on proselytism, Ritenbaugh on Amos 5:25, Brown on the loneliness of being liked — and we did not get to any of them. The meeting went in a different direction. I am glad it did. The deeper question that the recent essays have been circling — what kind of Christian community is faithful, in this moment, in this culture — surfaced more directly than I could have engineered, and the synthesis that emerged is more substantive than I expected.
The Christian Underground is the name we have been working toward. I will spend the week thinking about what it commits us to. I will return to the fellowship next Sunday with a preliminary articulation. Susan will return, I trust, with the fast and the further readings of the come out passages. Charlie will return with whatever the next week of bird-watching teaches him. Isak will return with whatever the rogue-Christian discernment process surfaces. Leonard will return with the next layer of metaphor — perhaps the Christian Overground in some new form, perhaps the bird metaphor pressed further, perhaps the Idiocracy reference unpacked into a serious cultural diagnosis. Michael, if he is willing, will return with the citations I owe him and the next iteration of his interfaith framework.
This is what the fellowship is for. We do not have the answer. We are, together, the people who are willing to keep asking the question. The Lord is sufficient to the answer, in his time.
Thank you, Susan, for the closing prayer. Thank you, fellowship, for the morning.
— Thomas
by Thomas Abshier | May 10, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Law Beneath the Mercy Seat: Amos 5:25, and the Harmony of Grace and Obedience
Fellowship Essay | 10 May 2026
The daily Berean email this morning carried an excerpt from the late John W. Ritenbaugh, drawn from a longer essay he co-authored with his son Richard T. Ritenbaugh, titled Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness. The excerpt is short — perhaps eight paragraphs — and it is anchored on a single rhetorical question from the prophet Amos:
Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? — Amos 5:25
Ritenbaugh’s answer to the rhetorical question is the right one: yes, the people did sacrifice in the wilderness; but sacrifice was not the whole of what God had asked of them, and a sacrificial life detached from an obedient life is not what God wants from a redeemed people. From this answer, he develops one of the more important theological points in the Forerunner archive — that grace and obedience are not in tension, that the law and the blood are not alternatives, that Mount Sinai is not the cancellation of Passover but its proper sequel.
I want to commend this point to the fellowship, deepen it from a few angles Ritenbaugh’s brief excerpt does not have space to develop, and bring it back to how we are trying to live as a community. There is more substantive agreement between the Christos framework and Ritenbaugh’s position on this question than there is on some others, and I want to honor that.
The order of events in the wilderness
The chronological structure of the Exodus narrative is itself the argument Ritenbaugh is making. The sequence God established was:
A lamb is killed; the blood is placed on the doorposts; the destroyer passes over (Exodus 12).
The people are led out of Egypt across the Red Sea; the pursuing army is destroyed; Israel is, in the most concrete sense possible, freed (Exodus 14-15).
Then — only then, after the redemption is finished — does the column of cloud and fire bring them to Sinai, where the law is given (Exodus 19-20).
The people who hear the Ten Words from the smoking mountain are not slaves earning their way out of bondage. They are former slaves who have already been delivered, listening to the One who delivered them describe the shape of the life He intends for them now that they are free. The law arrives as a pattern, not as a price. The redemption is complete before a single commandment is uttered. Whatever else the law is for, it is not for purchasing a freedom that has already been given.
This is the structural fact Ritenbaugh leans on, and it is the fact the New Testament repeatedly draws back to. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 5:1) precedes, in Paul’s letter, the long discussion of how the redeemed should walk that follows in chapters 6 through 8. The justification is finished. The walking comes after. The walking is not the ground of the justification. It is the visible shape of a life that justification has already changed.
This ordering matters because both of the great distortions of Christian teaching get this ordering wrong, in opposite directions. Legalism treats the law as something the believer obeys in order to earn standing with God. Antinomianism treats the law as something the believer no longer needs to bother with because grace has settled the matter. The first reverses the Exodus sequence by putting Sinai before the Red Sea. The second deletes Sinai from the sequence altogether and pretends only the Red Sea matters. Both misread the text. Ritenbaugh’s reading — Sinai follows Passover, and therefore the obedient life follows the redeemed life — is the right reading, and it is the reading the broader catholic Christian witness has held in its better moments across two thousand years.
What sat inside the ark, and what sat above it
Ritenbaugh draws particular attention to a piece of furniture that I want to draw out further. The Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost room of the Tabernacle and later of the Temple, was a wooden chest overlaid in gold. Inside the chest, eventually, were three things: a portion of manna, Aaron’s rod that had budded, and the two stone tablets on which the Decalogue had been written by the finger of God (Hebrews 9:4). On top of the chest sat a separate, smaller piece, beaten from a single sheet of pure gold, with two cherubim of one piece extending their wings forward over it. This piece was called, in Hebrew, the kapporet. It is the same noun-root from which the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, takes its name. The verb form means to cover, to wipe, to atone for. The piece itself is, etymologically, the cover. The cover. The covering thing. It is what is over the law.
This is what English Bibles call the Mercy Seat.
The image, taken in its full geometric sense, is theologically dense. God’s localized presence sat above it, between the wings of the cherubim. The blood of the atonement sacrifice, on one day a year, was sprinkled on it by the high priest. And underneath it, inside the box it covered, were the stone tablets of God’s holy demand on His people. The arrangement was deliberate. The mercy was over the law, sprinkled with blood, with God’s presence brooding above. It was not that mercy replaced the law or eliminated it. The law was still there, intact, in the same chamber, contained in the same chest. What was different was that mercy covered it. Atonement was the lid that allowed the holy God to dwell in the same room as a people who could not, on any given day, claim to have kept what was written on the stones underneath.
The New Testament does not let this image go. When the writer to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle furniture, he uses the Greek noun hilasterion to translate the kapporet (Hebrews 9:5). When Paul reaches for the deepest possible single image of what Christ has done at the cross, he uses the same word: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation — hilasterion — through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past (Romans 3:25). Christ Himself, in Paul’s argument, is the Mercy Seat. The cover of the Ark, the place where the blood is sprinkled and the presence dwells, the lid over the law. That image lands at the cross. The blood underneath the brooding presence, the law preserved beneath, the mercy that covers without canceling, the presence that draws near because the covering is in place — all of it converges on the body broken at Golgotha and the blood that ran from it.
And then, three verses after using hilasterion of Christ, Paul asks the question that the antinomian distortion has been answering wrongly ever since:
Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law. — Romans 3:31
The ordinary translation of katargoumen is abolish or render inoperative. Paul is asking, after the longest argument for justification by faith ever written: have we abolished the law by what we have just said? His answer is the strongest negative the Greek language can carry: me genoito — let it not be. God forbid. The faith that grasps the hilasterion does not abolish the law; it establishes it. Paul’s word for establish, histanomen, is the same word used elsewhere of confirming or making firm. Faith makes the law firm. Grace gives the law its standing in the believer’s life.
This is the same point Ritenbaugh is pressing toward in the Forerunner essay, and it is the point at the heart of the broad New Testament witness. Grace does not retire the law. Grace is what makes the law livable.
Where Paul takes it next
Romans is not done with the question after chapter three. Paul comes back to it in chapter six, where he names directly the antinomian distortion of his own argument:
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? — Romans 6:1-2
Some hearer of Paul’s preaching had evidently drawn the conclusion that if grace covers sin, then the more sin, the more grace, and therefore the more sin, the better. Paul does not hedge in his rebuttal. The same me genoito — God forbid — that protects the establishment of the law in chapter three protects the moral seriousness of the redeemed life in chapter six. The redeemed have died to sin. The grammar of redemption is not now I can sin freely; it is now I have been crucified with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth I should not serve sin (Romans 6:6).
By the time Paul reaches chapter eight, the picture has fully emerged. The law was holy, just, good (7:12). The problem was never the law; the problem was the flesh that could not keep it (7:14-25). The solution was not the abolition of the law but the sending of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit:
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. — Romans 8:3-4
Read that sentence carefully. The righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us. Not abolished. Not suspended. Not made optional. Fulfilled in us, who walk after the Spirit. The grace that gives the Spirit is the grace that makes the law’s requirement realizable in the redeemed life. The law and the Spirit are not opposed. The Spirit is what makes the law a description of how the believer actually lives, rather than an indictment of how the believer continually fails to live.
This is what Ritenbaugh’s two-halves framing is reaching for. The blood covers; the Spirit empowers; the redeemed life is one in which the law’s righteousness is increasingly visible. Sanctification is the name for this. The believer, growing under grace, comes to look more and more like the holy God whose pattern of life the law was always describing.
The application question, briefly
I do not want to leave a question unanswered that the careful reader will already be asking. Which law are we talking about? The Decalogue? The dietary laws of Leviticus 11? The civil penalties for theft and adultery? The festival calendar with its new moons and seventh days?
The wider Christian tradition has worked through this question in different ways. The Reformed branch has historically distinguished between moral law (the Decalogue, summed up in Christ’s two great commandments — love of God and love of neighbor), ceremonial law (the sacrificial system, the dietary code, the festival calendar), and civil law (the penalties of the Israelite theocracy). On this division, the moral law is eternally binding, the ceremonial law has been fulfilled in Christ in the sense that what it foreshadowed has now arrived, and the civil law was given to a particular people in a particular polity and does not bind Christians as such. The Lutheran branch has worked the question through the law-gospel distinction. The Catholic tradition has worked it through the natural-law and divine-positive-law framework. The Wesleyan branch has emphasized progressive sanctification more than the threefold partition.
Ritenbaugh’s tradition — the Church of the Great God lineage, descended from Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God — has historically rejected the threefold-division and applied the law more uniformly to Christians, including the seventh-day Sabbath and the Mosaic festival calendar. This is a real difference between Ritenbaugh’s tradition and the Christos framework, which broadly inhabits the Reformed-influenced threefold-division view. The difference is not nothing, and it bears on how a fellowship community structures its weekly and annual life.
But it is not the difference I want to dwell on in this essay. The disagreement on which law is binding presupposes the agreement on which Ritenbaugh and the broader catholic Christian witness stand together: that the redeemed are called to obedience, that grace is not license, that Mount Sinai followed Passover for a reason, that the Mercy Seat sat above the law and did not replace it. On the underlying point — that grace and obedience are inseparable, that sanctification is real, that a Christianity which has dropped the law has dropped half of itself — Ritenbaugh and we are on the same side. The application question is a fellowship-level discernment, not a fellowship-dividing one.
Where the contemporary church needs this
The American evangelical landscape has, for a generation now, been pulled toward a kind of grace-only preaching that has retired the law in practice if not in confession. Phrases circulate that are almost designed to soften the moral seriousness of the redeemed life: grace is unmerited favor (true, as far as it goes, but spoken in a way that implies the favor never asks anything of the favored); we are saved by grace, not by works (true, as Paul says, but spoken in a way that makes works invisible afterward); don’t let anyone put you under the law (true in some senses, dangerous in others). What gets lost is precisely the structure Ritenbaugh is recovering — that grace and obedience are not adversaries, that the redeemed life is a life, that the saved person is being made into someone whose life looks more and more like the One who saved them.
The other distortion, legalism, exists too — particularly in some immigrant church communities, in some conservative-Reformed contexts, and in some sectarian movements that Christianize their own preferred set of cultural rules and call them God’s law. Both distortions miss what Ritenbaugh is naming. The legalist reverses the Exodus order and puts the law before the redemption. The antinomian deletes the law from the sequence and pretends only the redemption matters. Neither honors the actual structure of the biblical narrative, the actual furniture in the Holy of Holies, the actual argument of Romans, or the actual life Christ called His followers to live.
For our fellowship — and for me as I write this — the call is the same one Amos was bringing to the northern kingdom in 760 BC. Are we sacrificing without obeying? Are we attending the gathering without changing how we conduct our business? Are we showing up to the feasts without examining whether we have left the feast different from how we arrived? Ritenbaugh’s reading of Amos applies. The question presses the same way now as then. Sacrifice that is not joined to obedience is sacrifice God will not have.
The Ideomotion charter we have spent the past several days revising is, if it works as intended, a small and concrete instance of grace-and-obedience working together. The ministry character of the work is not earned by the obedience; the obedience flows from the ministry character. The §7 ethical commitments — non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, truthful claims — are not legalisms tacked onto a Christian-branded business. They are the visible shape of a redeemed posture toward the customer. The grace gives the disposition; the obedience is what the disposition looks like in practice. To attempt the obedience without the grace would be to reverse the Exodus order. To claim the grace without the obedience would be to delete Sinai from the sequence. We are trying to keep them in the right relationship — Mount Sinai after the Red Sea, the law beneath the Mercy Seat, the redeemed life that obeys because it has first been freed.
Crescendo
The verse I want to close on is not from Romans this time. It is from the first letter of John, a letter written, we believe, by the apostle who lay closest to Jesus at the last supper and who outlived all the others to see the end of the apostolic age. John has watched a generation come and go. He has watched the gospel survive Nero’s fires and Domitian’s exiles. And in his old age he writes — pastorally, and with the bluntness of an old man who has earned the right to say what he means:
And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him. He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk, even as he walked. — 1 John 2:3-6
This is the apostolic verdict on the question Ritenbaugh is engaging. The test of whether we know Christ is whether we keep His commandments. Not because keeping them earns the knowledge, but because the knowing of Christ produces the keeping. A person who claims to know Him without keeping is, in John’s plain word, a liar. The Greek term is pseustes, the same word used elsewhere of those who are constitutionally untruthful. John is not soft-pedaling. The Christianity that brackets out obedience is, on the apostolic reading, not Christianity at all. It is a self-deception that has borrowed the vocabulary.
The opposite is also true. The one who keeps the word — the one whose life shows the visible shape of obedience — is the one in whom the love of God is perfected. The Greek for perfected is teteleiōtai, from telos: brought to its end, brought to maturity, brought to its intended completion. The keeping of the commandments is what brings the love of God to its full stature in the believer. Not a substitute for grace. A consummation of grace.
That is what Ritenbaugh is naming, and that is what I commend to the fellowship for our discussion. The grace and the obedience are not adversaries. They are the front and back of the same coin, the redemption-then-Sinai sequence, the Mercy-Seat-above-the-law geometry, the Spirit-fulfilling-the-law-in-us in Romans 8 and the keeping-his-commandments in 1 John 2. We will disagree at the edges with Ritenbaugh’s tradition on which specific commandments are in view in our practical application — that is a real and not-trivial disagreement and we should not pretend it isn’t. But on the central matter, on the structural point that the redeemed are called to obey and that obedience is the visible fruit of grace, we and Ritenbaugh stand together.
There is a famine of this teaching in much of the contemporary church. There is a famine of the truthful word that Amos warned would come and that John warned would come and that we are, perhaps, watching arrive. The remedy is not legalism, and it is not antinomian sentimentalism. It is the recovery of the actual gospel — the gospel in which a holy God has made a way, through the blood of His Son, for an unholy people to dwell with Him; and in which that same God expects, of the people He has made His own, that they will increasingly look like Him. The Mercy Seat above the law. The blood that covers. The Spirit that fulfills. The life that shows.
That is the religion God will have. May we, by His mercy, increasingly become the people He calls us to be.
Sources
John W. Ritenbaugh and Richard T. Ritenbaugh, Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Five): Religion and Holiness, Forerunner, October 29, 2025. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1941. The excerpt engaged in this essay is the section titled “Grace and Law,” received via cgg.org daily Berean email distribution, May 8, 2026.
Internal Renaissance Ministries references: `CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md` (companion essay engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism, also from the cgg.org Forerunner archive); `IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md` v0.3 §7 (the ethics-and-non-coercion section referenced in the application paragraph above).
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Exodus 12; Exodus 14-15; Exodus 19-20; Hebrews 9:4-5; Romans 3:25, 31; Romans 5:1; Romans 6:1-2, 6; Romans 7:12, 14-25; Romans 8:3-4; 1 John 2:3-6; Amos 5:25.
Hebrew lexical references: kapporet (Strong’s H3727), root kaphar (H3722); related: Yom Kippur, kippurim. Greek lexical references: hilasterion (Strong’s G2435), katargoumen (G2673), histanomen (G2476), me genoito (G3361 + G1096), teteleiōtai (G5048).
Theological-tradition references for the threefold-division of the law mentioned in the application section: Westminster Confession of Faith XIX (Reformed); Lutheran Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration VI (law-gospel distinction); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II Q.99 (Catholic). These are not engaged in detail above but are the tradition the application discussion draws from.
by Thomas Abshier | May 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
Knotholes and the Apostolic Deposit: A Fellowship Conversation with Leonard on Joseph Smith, Denver Snuffer, and the Restoration Question
Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 9, 2026
Occasion: A long phone conversation with Leonard Hofheins, a member of the fellowship and a former Latter-day Saint who now follows the teachings of Denver Snuffer, the excommunicated LDS author whose work treats Joseph Smith’s restoration as authentic but the modern LDS Church as having drifted from it. The conversation arose from four essays I had recently sent Leonard, drafted from thirty video transcripts on Snuffer’s learnofchrist.org site. Leonard had passed those essays back to Snuffer himself, who responded with a brief and gracious note describing the analysis as fair, Christian in spirit, and a reasonable attempt at respectful disagreement. The conversation that followed between Leonard and me ranged across the longing for direct experience of God, the analogies of knot holes and oceans, the historical pattern of apostasy and restoration, the question of additional canon, the wheat-and-tares problem of mixed revelation, and finally the question of whether and on what terms the apostolic deposit can be supplemented by latter-day prophetic voices.
The position governing this essay: Leonard and I share more on this question than we differ on. Both of us hold that the human heart is made for a direct relationship with the living God; both of us hold that obedience flows from that relationship rather than purchasing it; both of us hold that the Holy Spirit speaks today and that the believer must learn to listen. The disagreement is narrower than it looks, but it is real and consequential. It concerns whether the apostolic deposit — the canonical witness of the apostles to Christ, however imperfectly transmitted — is the sufficient ground of the church’s confession, with the Spirit illuminating that ground in every generation; or whether that deposit is properly supplemented by latter-day prophetic restorations — Joseph Smith’s, Denver Snuffer’s, others’ — that add new canonical material the church is bound to receive. I hold the first. Leonard holds the second. The conversation reproduced and engaged with in this essay is the most charitable working-out of that disagreement I can offer, with Leonard’s case presented as fully as I can before I respond to it.
Context: This conversation is part of an ongoing series of fellowship engagements with Latter-day Saint, post-LDS, and Restoration-movement interlocutors who form part of the broader Renaissance Ministries community. Leonard is a treasured friend and a respected member of the fellowship. Nothing in what follows should be read as questioning his sincerity, his discipleship, or the depth of his pursuit of the living God. The disagreement is a doctrinal one held within fellowship, not a fellowship-dividing one.
To the Fellowship —
I had a long conversation with Leonard yesterday. We have known each other for some time now, and on most matters of Christian discipleship we are in close agreement. The conversation began in an unusual place: I told him plainly that the only reason I am doing this ministry — the only reason I am a Christian in the form I now am — is the physics. The Conscious Point Physics work is not, for me, a side project. It is the substrate from which my whole picture of God, the soul, the moral order, and the structure of reality has been built up. I told Leonard I feel a great obligation to bring that physics to a place where conventional science recognizes it, because the implications for the Christian witness are direct and the framework is, in my own conviction, clear.
Leonard’s response was the response of a friend. He said the work was righteous, that I was not doing it for nefarious or selfish reasons, that I had been called into it through what amounted to an external prompting, and that all prophets across the ages have struggled with exactly the communication problem I had just described — the problem of holding premises that one’s audience does not yet hold, and trying to argue from them to conclusions that the audience cannot follow because the premises are foreign. He named Joseph Smith specifically as someone who, on his reading, faced the same difficulty in 1820: a young man with a vision and a calling, working out how to communicate something for which the existing vocabulary was inadequate.
That comparison was the seed of the longer conversation. Leonard’s case for the Restoration tradition emerged from it gradually, in his own voice and on his own terms, and I want to lay it out as fully and as charitably as I can before I respond to it. There is more I agree with in what Leonard said than I disagree with, and I owe his position a fair hearing.
What Leonard sees rightly: the longing, the limited view, the vast ocean
Leonard began with the observation that runs through everything else he said: the human being is made for a direct relationship with the One who made him, and the present forms of religious life mostly fall short of that. He told a story I had heard him tell before about his time as a missionary in Venezuela. Looking back, he said, he had not been bringing people to God; he had been selling them an organization. He compared it to selling Amway. The product was not bad; the products were good; the organization had genuine virtues. But the project of getting someone to join the organization was not the same as the project of helping them know God, and he had spent time on the first when he should have been on the second.
This is an important observation about his LDS missionary efforts and membership, but it is not my primary criticism of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, or Denver Snuffer. I believe the substitution of promotion, membership, and working for a religious institution over a relationship with God is a common feature/aspect of religious movements, whether a Christian denomination, a Restoration or Charismatic movement, an Eastern religion, or a cult. The right object of evangelism is not the institution; it is the One the institution exists to point to. That they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent (John 17:3). This is the correct object of evangelism, and I agree with Leonard’s instinct, and the Fellowship should take this temptation as foundational.
From this, Leonard moved to two analogies that served as important metaphors throughout the conversation. The first was the knot hole. Imagine, he said, a wooden fence with knot holes in it — the small, round openings where branches once grew. Each of us is looking at the divine through one of those holes. We see something; it is our experience. To us, it is real, true, and the full picture of life. But what we see is only what the whole admits. Different people are looking through different holes. (Note: What Leonard implies is that whatever we see is only aportion of the truth, and I agree with that, but what we may be looking at may be false presentation of the truth. If the Truth is Jesus Christ and His redemption from sin as the only true way to God, then all other paths, however sincere and true in our view, are not the truth. This is where the knothole analogy breaks down. The fact is that the spiritual knothole can have filters on it that distort the view. It looks true, feels real, but it is a distortion of reality.) Thus, the Hindu, the Christian, the Mormon, the Jew, the secular seeker — each has a knothole that they believe is the truth. Each sees something. Using this metaphor, mutual respect is the proper posture, because no one sees the whole. But this analogy fails because it does not take into account that spiritual knotholes can be projections of a spiritual fabrication and can appear as divine revelation when, in fact, they are the creation of demons appearing as angels of light. Thus, the only proper comparison is that we should honor/affirm/laud only those whose efforts do not contradict what is true, and I take my standard to be the Revelation of the Apostolic Deposit, not any other scripture or revelation. To the extent that it corresponds to Biblical revelation, I applaud it. In all other aspects, I caution that it may be a deception, regardless of the appearance of the divine package in which it is delivered.***
The second analogy was the ocean. God, Leonard said, is the ocean. We are holding a coffee cup of water from the ocean, and we are trying to define the ocean from what is in our cup. We have not even mapped half of the actual ocean of God’s reality. Most of the life in the actual ocean lives in the top three hundred feet; what is below that, we mostly do not know. So it is with God. We can only know what He chooses to reveal to us, and the way we receive that revelation is the way Scripture itself prescribes: ask, seek, knock. If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him (James 1:5). Leonard quoted that verse not in passing but as the operative principle of his own spiritual life. He said it had been the operative principle of Joseph Smith’s spiritual life as a fourteen-year-old boy in upstate New York. He said it was the operative principle of every serious seeker of God across history.
I have nothing to disagree with in any of that, and I want to be clear about it. The longing for direct relationship is right. The recognition that we see in part is right. The ocean-and-coffee-cup picture is right. The appeal to James 1:5 is right. The instinct that institutional religion can become a substitute for the thing institutional religion is meant to point to is right. If the conversation had stopped there, there would have been nothing to write about.
Leonard’s case for restoration
The conversation moved past mutual recognition when Leonard developed what he and the broader Restoration movement understand as the historical and theological argument for the necessity of a restoration. The argument has several strands and Leonard laid them out carefully, in roughly this order.
First, the pattern of apostasy and restoration is, on Leonard’s reading, the structural pattern of biblical history itself. Moses brings Israel out of slavery; Israel apostatizes; the prophets are sent; Israel apostatizes more deeply; the exile comes; restoration comes; apostasy returns; eventually Christ comes to a Judaism that has so deeply apostatized from its own scriptures that it kills its own God. The gospel goes to the Gentiles. The Gentile church flourishes for two centuries and is then absorbed by the Roman emperor Constantine into a state church — Catholic meaning universal, the universal church being a creation of an earthly worldly organization, on Leonard’s view, more than a continuation of the apostolic body. From that absorption all the rest of Christian denominationalism descended. By 1820, when Joseph Smith was a fourteen-year-old boy in New York, the Christian world had divided into multiple competing denominations, all reading the same Bible, all coming to mutually contradictory conclusions, all on the verge of war with one another over their interpretations. The young Joseph Smith, on Leonard’s account, was caught in this confusion, took James 1:5 with full seriousness, went into a grove of trees to pray for the first time aloud in his life, and received a vision in which the Lord told him that none of the existing churches were of Him, that knowledge had been lost, and that a restoration was coming. Joseph never recanted that account; he died professing it; on Leonard’s reading, the inner consistency of his testimony across his life is itself evidence of its authenticity.
Second, Leonard pointed to specific biblical predictions that, on the Restoration tradition’s reading, are the textual ground for the necessity of a restoration. Paul’s reference in 2 Thessalonians 2 to a falling away that must come first; the prophets’ references to a famine of the word in the last days; the Book of Mormon’s own language about Gentiles in the last days who treat their existing canon as closed and call additional revelation a stumbling block. The closed-canon position, in Leonard’s framing, is itself the stumbling block the Lord predicted — not the corrective to error but the chief instance of it.
Third, Leonard offered his own working framework for direct experience of God, drawing on Doctrine and Covenants section 93:1. The framework is sequential and demanding. Forsake your sins. First you must understand what sin is in your own life and put it down. Come unto Him. This is its own movement, distinct from the forsaking; it is the deliberate approach of the soul, on its knees, toward the Lord. Call upon His name. The name is the key that opens the channel. Obey His voice. When the Lord speaks, you do what He says. Keep His commandments. Not as a checklist but as treasured possession, kept the way you keep something valuable. And when these are done, in the order in which they are given, the promise is that you shall see His face and know that He is. Leonard offered this not as theory but as the working pattern of his own life. He is in his sixties; he has not yet had the face-to-face experience the verse promises; he is striving for it; he believes it is available because the Lord is no respecter of persons and because the verse is plain.
Fourth and finally, Leonard pointed to Denver Snuffer specifically. Denver, on Leonard’s account, has had the kind of direct experience the Doctrine and Covenants verse describes. He does not advertise this. He treats it as the most ordinary thing in the world — not because it is ordinary but because, having stood in the presence of the divine, he cannot claim any special status, since what he saw was so much greater than what he is. Leonard cited two recent interviews on the Mormon Book Review podcast in which Denver shared, with an evangelical Christian interviewer named Steve Pinker, accounts of his experiences that he has rarely shared with his own followers. Leonard found this striking and persuasive. A man who shares his deepest experiences with a sympathetic outsider rather than with his own movement is not, on Leonard’s reading, a man building a personality cult; he is a man bearing witness in the place where bearing witness is most useful and least self-aggrandizing.
I have laid Leonard’s case out at this length because it deserves it. There is nothing dishonest in any of it. There is nothing self-serving in any of it. Leonard is a serious disciple of Christ, a man pursuing the direct knowledge of God along the line of a tradition he has thought through carefully and held with integrity, who has paid the cost of leaving the institutional LDS Church when its leadership departed from what he understood to be the apostolic posture. He told me, frankly, that he had stepped away from the modern LDS Church because some of its recent statements struck him as “anti-Christ,” in the precise sense that they had compromised the unique Lordship of Christ as the gate. That is not a small thing for a lifelong member to say, and it indicates that Leonard’s commitment is to the thing itself rather than to the institutional vehicle — exactly the posture he commended to me at the start of the conversation.
Where the agreement runs deep
I want to be very clear about what I do not disagree with in any of this. I do not disagree that the human being is made for direct relationship with God. I do not disagree that institutional religion can become a substitute for that relationship. I do not disagree that we see in part. I do not disagree that the Lord still speaks. I do not disagree that James 1:5 is operative for every believer who will pray it in faith. I do not disagree that the historical pattern of human religious life shows recurrent drift and recurrent recovery. I do not disagree that the modern Christian denominations, taken as a class, contain real distortions of the apostolic faith. I do not disagree that the human heart longs for the kind of face-to-face encounter the Doctrine and Covenants verse describes.
I told Leonard this directly, more than once, and I want it on the record here. There was almost nothing in what he said about God, prayer, seeking, sincerity, or the structure of discipleship that I would withhold assent from. The disagreement, when it comes, is on a narrower question than the conversation might suggest. It is the question of canon — the question of which voices the church is bound to receive as authoritative witness, and which voices, however valuable, must be received as something less than that.
Not all knot holes are equal
The first move I made in response to Leonard’s case was on the knot-hole analogy itself. The analogy, taken at face value, has a generous quality I appreciate. Everyone is looking through a hole; everyone sees something; mutual respect is the proper posture. But the analogy as it stands does work that the analogy itself does not warrant. It assumes that all the holes are looking at the same fence, and that what is on the other side of every hole is some portion of the same divine reality. This is not obviously the case. Some knot holes are looking at the truth that will set you free; some are looking at a partial truth that will set you partially free; some are looking at distortions that will, if followed, place you in bondage. Not all knot holes are oriented toward the same picture.
Leonard granted this. He said: I’m not saying every knot hole is equal — I’m saying everybody has one when it comes to how they perceive the divine. Fair enough. I accept the qualification. Then he made what I take to be the move that does the actual work in the Restoration argument: he said that every once in a while, the Lord does break down a plank of the fence and let someone actually see the bigger picture. This is the warrant. The Restoration tradition is the claim that Joseph Smith was one of those someones. The plank came down; the bigger picture was given; what Joseph Smith saw was not knot-hole vision but plank-down vision; and therefore the canon Joseph delivered is not one knot hole’s view among others but a corrective to the knot-hole limitations the rest of Christendom is operating under. Denver Snuffer, in this picture, is a man who has himself stood at the plank-down place and is reporting what he saw there.
I understand the move. I do not think the move can carry the weight the Restoration tradition asks it to carry. The reason is what I want to develop next.
The replacement question, however gently framed
I told Leonard, plainly, that the Restoration claim is structurally a replacement claim. He pushed back on this. He said he does not see it as a replacement; he sees it as an addition, a filling in, a completion of what is missing. I want to honor that he does not experience it as a replacement, and I take him at his word. But I want also to say that, intellectually, I cannot avoid the conclusion that it functions as one, regardless of how it is held subjectively.
The reason is simple. When two sources speak to the same question and produce different answers, the believer cannot follow both. He must choose. The apostolic deposit and the Joseph Smith canon do not always speak to the same questions, and on many questions they are compatible. But on some questions they are not. I gave Leonard one example I happen to know: the question of where the atonement was completed. The apostolic deposit places the atonement at the cross — through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10), he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21), it is finished at the cross itself in John 19:30. The Joseph Smith canon, as I understand it from the four essays I sent Leonard, places the atonement substantially in Gethsemane, with the cross as the completion of what was already accomplished in the garden. These are not the same picture. They cannot both be the structurally correct account of where the work of redemption was done. One of them has to be primary, and the other has to be secondary or wrong.
Leonard, characteristically, said he remembered the Gethsemane point from one of the four essays I sent him. He did not contest that it was a real difference. He took it on board. But the existence of differences like that — and that one is just an example; there are others — means that any tradition that holds both the apostolic deposit and the Joseph Smith canon as authoritative is, in fact, having to choose between them at the points where they diverge. The choice is unavoidable. And when the choice is made in favor of the latter-day source on a doctrinal question, the apostolic deposit has been functionally replaced as the controlling authority on that question, however gently the replacement is framed.
This is what I mean when I say that, structurally, the Restoration position is a replacement position. Not because Leonard or Denver want to replace anything. Not because the rhetoric of the Restoration tradition uses the word replacement. But because, on any question where the two sources disagree, one of them is being functionally treated as the higher authority, and that one is the latter-day source, because the latter-day source is what makes the Restoration claim distinctive in the first place. If the apostolic deposit is sufficient where it speaks, the Restoration is unnecessary; if the Restoration is necessary, it is necessary precisely because it is correcting or supplementing the apostolic deposit at the points where they differ.
The wheat-and-tares problem
The deeper objection follows from the replacement question. Suppose I grant, for the sake of argument, that Joseph Smith was a sincere seeker who saw something real in the grove in 1820 — that, in Leonard’s terms, a plank of the fence came down for him. I am willing to grant this. I do not know that it did, and I do not know that it did not, but the possibility is not something I can refute, and Joseph Smith’s lifelong consistency on the point is real evidence in its favor. Suppose further that what he saw was, like every prophet’s vision in scripture, partial — one wide view rather than the whole panorama. Suppose further still that in the years that followed, he transmitted some of what he saw faithfully and some of what he saw less faithfully, that his memory and his interpretive frame and his cultural moment shaped the transmission, and that what came down through the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price contains both genuine revelation and human admixture — some wheat, some tares, mixed together in the same field, exactly as the Lord said the world’s mixed condition would always look until the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30).
The question I cannot solve from inside the Restoration tradition is: which is which? I do not have the gift of separating the two. Leonard does not, on his own testimony, have the gift of separating the two. The modern LDS Church, by his own departure from it, has not separated them well; Denver Snuffer’s project is, at least in part, an attempt to identify which parts of the post-Joseph LDS development have departed from the original revelation. But the disagreement among Restoration-tradition figures about what is wheat and what is tare is itself the proof that no human can sort the field reliably. And if no human can sort the field reliably, then taking the field as canon is a different operation from taking the apostolic deposit as canon — not because the apostolic deposit lacks tares but because the apostolic deposit has been tested by the church across two thousand years, by hundreds of millions of believers in every culture, against the Holy Spirit’s witness in every generation, and has produced a remarkably stable confessional core. The Joseph Smith canon has been tested by far fewer believers across far less time, and the testing has, even within the Restoration tradition itself, produced multiple incompatible readings of what the original revelation actually was.
I told Leonard that I cannot risk my discipleship on a canon I cannot reliably sort. I would rather take the apostolic deposit as my ground, with all its imperfections of transmission, and then ask the Holy Spirit directly to fill in what is missing — doing for myself, in miniature, exactly what Joseph Smith did at fourteen, but without canonizing the result. Lord, this deposit is incomplete. I know it is incomplete. Show me what is missing. The Lord can answer that prayer in any believer’s life. The answer, when it comes, is for that believer; it is not for the church as binding canon. The closed canon is not a stumbling block in this picture. It is a discipline. It says: this is the foundation that has been tested and confirmed across the catholic Christian witness; build your life on it; receive what the Spirit shows you privately; do not impose what you have received as canon on anyone else. The closed canon protects the church from the proliferation of latter-day prophets each making different incompatible canonical claims, all of which would have to be sorted, none of which can be sorted reliably from the inside.
A vignette: the only voice I have ever heard
I told Leonard, in the middle of all this, a story I have not often told. Some years ago I was, for a time, deeply involved in a Buddhist religious movement. I was chanting before their scripture in an altered state, with a friend in a barrio in Los Angeles, and as the chanting went on I had a vision of myself falling into a flame. And in the vision I heard a voice. The voice said, Don’t go. I knew it was Jesus. I do not know how I knew. I knew. I threw down the beads. I walked out of the apartment. That was the only time in my life I have ever heard, audibly, the voice of the Lord.
The other thing I have ever experienced that I take to be revelation in any direct sense was the picture of the galaxy and the lines of the stars that became the structural intuition behind the Conscious Point Physics work. That is it. Two experiences. One audible warning, one structural vision. I am not Joseph Smith. I am not Denver Snuffer. I am not John on Patmos. I am not Paul on the Damascus road. I have lived a long life of Christian discipleship with two direct interventions of the kind the great prophets received continuously.
And here is what that experience taught me, which bears on the conversation with Leonard. When the Lord wants you to hear something, you hear it. When He wants to redirect you, He redirects you. The Lord is competent at His own communication. He does not need a latter-day prophet to mediate to you what He could tell you directly. The fact that He spoke to me audibly once, and structurally once, and otherwise has worked through the still small voice of the Spirit applied to the apostolic deposit, suggests to me that the apostolic deposit plus the Spirit is the standard mode of operation, and the dramatic prophetic visitation is the exceptional case — reserved, when it is given, for purposes whose canonical weight and verification cannot be assessed by the recipient himself.
I do not doubt that Denver Snuffer has had experiences he cannot have invented. I am not in a position to evaluate them. What I can say is that the canonical implications of his experiences, however genuine the experiences themselves, are not a question I can settle from the outside, and the safe ground — the ground I can defend — is the ground of the apostolic deposit, with the Spirit illuminating it. That is the ground I am building this fellowship on, and that is the ground I am inviting Leonard, Denver, and every Restoration-tradition believer to consider standing on with me.
Kill the Buddha on the road
There is a Zen saying that I borrowed for the closing argument of the conversation: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. The point of the saying is that any figure other than the ultimate object of devotion who positions himself between you and the ultimate object must be cleared away. The Buddha on the road is not the Buddha; the Buddha is what the figure on the road is pointing to; if the figure on the road is mistaken for the destination, the figure has become an idol and must be removed.
I told Leonard: I do not follow Apollos. I do not follow Paul. I do not follow Joseph Smith. I do not follow Denver Snuffer. I do not follow Thomas Abshier. I follow Jesus, and I read what the apostles wrote about Him because they were the men He chose to bear witness, and I receive what the Spirit shows me about that witness, and I bring what I have received into fellowship with other believers who have also received, and we test together what we have heard. That is the fellowship’s working method. It is exactly what Paul rebukes the Corinthians for losing in 1 Corinthians 1:12-13: every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul? The same rebuke applies to I am of Joseph Smith, I am of Denver, I am of Calvin, I am of Wesley, I am of any teacher whose name has come to organize the believer’s allegiance in place of the name of Christ.
Leonard accepted this without resistance. He said Denver himself does not want to be set up as a prophet, has resisted being set up as one, and has been adamant about it. I take him at his word. The problem is not what Denver wants; the problem is what those who follow Denver in fact do, and what the existence of Denver’s canon does to the conversation when it is brought into a Christian fellowship. To bring it in is to have the conversation Leonard and I just had, which is a conversation about whose canon is canon. I am not faulting Leonard for raising the conversation; I am the one who sent him the four essays. But the conversation is a real one, and the answer the fellowship has to give is the answer I have just given: we follow Jesus, we receive the apostolic deposit, we receive the Spirit, we test our receptions in council, and we do not canonize latter-day prophetic voices whose authority we cannot, from the inside, reliably evaluate.
The fellowship’s working answer
Toward the end of the conversation I told Leonard what I am trying to do with this ministry, and I want to put it on record here because the conversation crystallized it for me. I am trying to build a church that follows the Bible — the apostolic deposit, the canonical witness of the apostles to Christ — with each member doing his or her absolute best to figure out what it says and to listen to what the Holy Spirit is showing about it. We bring our individual hearings into fellowship. We say: I heard this. What did you hear? What did you hear? And we look for the common center of what has been heard. Where the hearings converge, we have stronger ground for confidence. Where they diverge, we hold the divergence as live and unsettled and we keep listening. The Spirit illuminates the deposit. The fellowship tests the illumination. The deposit is the floor.
This is, I think, what the apostolic church itself did. They had the Old Testament; they had Christ’s words and works as they had received them; they had the Spirit; they tested what they were hearing in council, most visibly at Jerusalem in Acts 15. They did not appeal to a latter-day prophet to settle the Gentile question. They appealed to scripture, to the Spirit’s manifest work among the Gentiles, and to the apostolic council’s collective judgment. The same method is available to us. It does not require additional canon. It requires the deposit, the Spirit, and the council.
Leonard, to his great credit, said at this point that he loved what I was describing, that he agreed with it totally, that this was what was needed, and that he wanted to participate in exactly that kind of fellowship. He had said earlier in the conversation that the most personal thing a human being can do is reach out to the One who created him, and that the kind of mutual listening I had just described — a meeting of the mind, you know, just see if we can find that commonality — was the kind of fellowship he had been longing for. We ended the conversation in agreement that we are on the same team, going in the same direction, with a doctrinal disagreement that does not need to divide the fellowship and a working method we can both pursue together.
I want to be clear about what that means and does not mean. It does not mean I have changed my position on the canon question. I have not. The apostolic deposit is the floor; latter-day prophetic voices, however valuable as private edification, are not canon for this fellowship and should not be canon for any fellowship that wants to keep its footing. What it means is that Leonard and I can hold our disagreement on that question while sharing fully in the work of fellowship, the discipline of mutual listening, the pursuit of direct relationship with the Lord, and the building of a community whose center is Christ rather than any teacher’s name. The disagreement is real; the fellowship is also real; both can be held at once.
Crescendo
The verse I want to close on is the one I quoted to Leonard near the end of the conversation, and it deserves the full reading.
For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. — 1 Corinthians 3:4-7
Paul will not let the Corinthian church organize itself around the names of its teachers. He will not even let it organize itself around his own name. The teachers are ministers; the increase comes from God; the believer’s allegiance is to the Christ the teachers point to, not to the teachers as such. This is the apostolic posture toward every later teacher who would arise, and it includes Joseph Smith, and it includes Denver Snuffer, and it includes me. None of us is the gate. I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me (John 14:6). The gate is one. The gate is named. The gate is the crucified and risen Christ to whom the apostolic deposit bears witness. Every other teacher whose work has any value at all has its value because it points to Him; every teacher whose work would obscure Him, however sincere, has misjudged his vocation; and the believer’s task is to follow the gate, not the gatekeepers, not the latter-day claimants, not the men who say here is Christ when the Christ is the One the canonical witness already names.
Leonard and I, on this, are in agreement. We both want to follow the gate. We disagree on whether the men who came after the apostles — particular men, particular voices, particular Restoration figures — are pointing toward the gate or have, however unintentionally, put themselves on the road in front of it. That disagreement is for the Lord to settle. What we can do, in the meantime, is keep listening — to the deposit, to the Spirit, to each other — and refuse to organize our discipleship around any name but His.
That is the fellowship I am building. That is the fellowship Leonard told me he wanted to be part of. That is the fellowship I commend to all of you for our continuing discussion.
“For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?” — 1 Corinthians 3:4
“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” — John 14:6
“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” — James 1:5
“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1
Sources
Primary source: telephone conversation between Thomas Lee Abshier and Leonard Hofheins, May 9, 2026, transcribed and edited for fellowship-essay form. Direct quotations of Leonard preserved where possible; arguments paraphrased where necessary for length and continuity, with the substantive content of his case rendered as fully as the format allows.
Background context: Denver Snuffer, learnofchrist.org video archive (thirty videos), engaged in four prior fellowship essays prepared in late April 2026 and shared with Leonard, who in turn shared two of them with Snuffer himself. Snuffer’s response, conveyed by Leonard during the conversation, characterized the analysis as fair, Christian in spirit, and a reasonable attempt at respectful disagreement.
Additional context: Steve Pinker, Mormon Book Review podcast, two recent interviews with Denver Snuffer (referenced by Leonard during the conversation; not independently reviewed for this essay).
Internal Renaissance Ministries references: prior fellowship essays in the May 7-9 sequence engaging Charles Whitaker on proselytism (CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-buick-salesman-and-the-great-commission.md) and John Ritenbaugh on grace and law (CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260508-the-law-beneath-the-mercy-seat.md); the four Denver Snuffer engagement essays referenced in the “Occasion” paragraph above.
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: John 17:3; James 1:5; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3; Matthew 13:24-30; Hebrews 10:10; 2 Corinthians 5:21; John 19:30; 1 Corinthians 1:12-13; 1 Corinthians 3:4-7; John 14:6; Acts 15; 1 John 4:1.
Latter-day Saint scriptural reference (engaged but not endorsed as canonical for this fellowship): Doctrine and Covenants 93:1, the sequence of forsaking sins, coming unto Him, calling upon His name, obeying His voice, and keeping His commandments, with the promise of seeing His face. The framework is engaged because Leonard offered it as the working pattern of his own discipleship; the engagement does not constitute endorsement of the broader Doctrine and Covenants as canon.
Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.
by Thomas Abshier | May 9, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts, Uncategorized
Liked, But Not Known: On Justin Brown and the Witness That Comes First
Fellowship Essay | by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND 8 May, 2026
Veg Out: Loneliness Essay, by Justin Brown
Charlie forwarded me an article this week from VegOut by Justin Brown, a writer based in Singapore, on a particular kind of loneliness — the kind that lives inside lives that look full from the outside. I want to commend it to the fellowship before I respond, because Brown sees something clearly that the church often does not see, and he names it with a precision I find pastorally useful. The piece is not long; it would be worth your time to read it before you read this.
Brown opens the article with a forty-one-year-old woman he calls Maya. She runs a small design studio in Lisbon. By her own count, she has on the order of sixty close friends. On her last birthday, forty of them sent her messages. She read each of them on the balcony, was touched by them, and then sat with the phone in her hand and tried to recall the most recent occasion on which she had said something honest about herself and the other person had followed up with a real question. The recollection refused to come.
That, Brown says, is the loneliness this article is about. It has nothing to do with how many contacts are in the phone.
What Brown sees rightly
I want to honor three things he sees before I add anything to them.
The first is the diagnosis itself. Loneliness, Brown argues, does not come from having no one around you; it comes from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. (Aside: I don’t know if the assumption of this particular aloneness is the ultimate end of all loneliness, but it is an important type of loneliness.) That is a real definition of a real condition, and it is more accurate than the cultural assumption that loneliness is a function of the volume of social contact. On Brown’s account, the right test is not the number of contacts in your phone. The right test is the question of whether anyone you currently know would register a difference if a slightly less-present version of you walked through the next week’s worth of social engagements. Most people, he says, would not. Most of us have been polite for too many years to ask, and too habituated to superficial contact to notice a difference.
In Brown’s developmental account, maybe around age nine or ten, he observes that certain children figure out that the most reliable route to being kept and welcomed is to make themselves easy. They settle into a role in the family — perhaps the cheerful one, perhaps the responsible one, perhaps the child who never gives anyone trouble — and they receive an immediate, durable, positive return on it. Adults relax in their presence. Other children include them. The reinforcement does not stop, and they do not see what is being exchanged for it. What that child is in fact learning, without naming it, is to trade legibility for likability (i.e., being known/read/seen is traded for the comfort of being accepted for their low-maintenance posture). They construct a self that is pleasant for others to be around, at the cost of a self anyone could come close enough to actually know. The bill on this trade does not arrive for decades. From the outside, the child looks like a successful person. From the inside, there is the slow, almost-unnoticed sense that the version of oneself everyone seems to like is the version that needs nothing — and a self that needs nothing is a self that nobody ever has reason to come closer to.
The third observation is about households. Emotional neglect, Brown points out, almost never resembles what the word neglect conjures. The houses where children grow up unheard are usually pleasant houses. They are not abusive. They have routines, holidays, family meals, and adults doing the best they know how. What is missing is not warmth and not provision; what is missing is the question. What do you actually think? What is actually going on with you? Some homes simply have no place in their conversational economy for that question. Others have a place for it, but only for one or two people in the family, and the rest of the household runs on logistics and humor and the inherited assumption that everyone is fine because no one has said otherwise. The child raised in such a house is, in Brown’s apt formulation, loved on paper and unseen in practice. By adolescence, they have stopped offering their inner life to the household. By adulthood, they have lost much of their access to it.
As a clinician, I have never had a patient come to me complaining of a deficiency of deep relationships. But I have had many patients say how satisfying it is to be heard. This may be evidence of not feeling heard or registered (as Brown puts it) in normal life. The diagnosis seems plausible. This issue is reminiscent of Socrates’s quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” If this is true, then the cost/consequence of closing off to one’s inner life is extreme – a life not worth living. Perhaps the reason for this extreme consequence is that insensitivity to our inner state makes us likewise go to sleep to the voice of conscience, divine guidance, and our ever-present divine companionship.
Brown posits that people develop the pathology of ignoring and silencing the inner voice in childhood as a developmental coping strategy. Perhaps this is the genesis. I suspect this may be a common result of the human condition. The need to survive in a hostile world forces a focus on external threats. The diagnosis of inner-world insensitivity rings true as a symptom/complaint and a deep cause of the commonly seen personality deficiency of the habitual compulsion/drive to please people. Self-sacrifice can result in ineffective action. When a person does not ask for what they need or cannot confront what is wrong/damaging/offensive, they will be ineffective at directing life in the way that feels right. Every person is a part of the web of life, and if they don’t listen to their inner state of distress, then, for certain, there is one person in life who is not satisfied/happy/enjoying life as it is. In other words, a life entirely of self-sacrifice does not satisfy the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
If all are living only to satisfy the other, then no one is satisfied. But this contradicts Jesus’ command to be the greatest in the kingdom, which is to be the servant of all. This paradox resolves when we realize that if we serve as God wants us to serve others, then each of us is serving properly, and denying service in excessive, deficient, or improper ways. The key is to serve, but serve rightly.
*** The problem with not listening to the Holy Spirit’s voice is that it informs us of God’s feelings/desires/optimum outcome of the current moment/situation. If there are issues with how I am being treated, and I am not speaking my mind, not risking rejection, not advocating for righteousness, then I am not serving my fellow man with hearty counsel. I can’t make the world better for me if I don’t ask or take action to make changes toward God’s optimum. Expecting that prayer alone will change the situation is to expect God to do the work of man. God’s work is to compute the trajectory of the entirety of life, and our job is to 1) pray to authorize Him to act and speak in our work and world, 2) mediate to listen/hear His voice, and 3) act on His counsel. Reading what other people are thinking/feeling is the more obvious and accessible input, given that it involves physical cues in words, tone, facial expressions, rewards, and punishments. But if we are not listening internally to what we want and need, we miss the leading of our own physiology and the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. This can lead to exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and a lack of depth in life, which ultimately can lead to physical complaints, and they come to see me as a doctor to fix them. The complaint is real, but beneath it lies the long, quiet exhaustion of having been polite and submitting to the other’s needs, and of being deaf to the Holy Spirit for years. This can be disguised as service, but in fact it is the opposite.***
Brown’s prescription, finally, is also right as far as it goes. The people who actually emerge from this kind of loneliness do not, on his observation, do so through grand reinvention. They begin instead with a single relationship, on a single low-stakes matter, by venturing one slightly more honest answer than they ordinarily would, and watching the other person’s response. The response is informative either way. Some relationships, Brown notes, are quietly built on the agreement that neither party will ever require deep candor from the other, and those relationships will not survive the moment one party deviates from the agreement; that loss is real, but it is also a way of seeing more clearly which relationships had been carrying real weight all along. What endures is usually a few people, sometimes only one, sometimes a person who, it now becomes apparent, has been quietly hoping for years that the other would speak more truthfully and did not know how to invite it.
The question Brown stops at
This is the point at which I want to add something rather than push back.
Brown’s article is honest in a way most secular writing on loneliness is not. He does not pretend that the volume problem is the real problem. He does not promise that an app or a club or a self-improvement regimen will fix it. He names what is actually missing — the presence of a person who registers the inner life, who notices when something said on one occasion is still going on under the surface a few days later, who does not need a crisis to ask how the other is really doing — and he is right that the absence of that figure, more than the absence of social contact, is what the data on chronic loneliness is actually tracking.
But Brown stops, I think, one question short of where the diagnosis presses.
Why does the loving, ordinary, reasonably functional household so reliably produce adults whose social worlds appear full while their inner worlds appear empty? Brown answers: because the household lacks the conversational register for the question that matters. That is true. But it is a description of the symptom, not of the cause. Why does it lack the register? Why do even loving parents, doing the best they know how, fail so reliably to produce children who feel known? Why does Brown’s diagnosis fit so many millions of people in homes that the parents themselves would describe as functional and warm?
The answer the Christian tradition has offered for two thousand years is that human beings, including loving ones, have a corrupted capacity to see one another. The Fall did not abolish love within families; it limited the range of what love within families can do. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). The verse is usually read as an indictment of the wicked. It is more honestly read as a description of the universal predicament. Even the people we love, we do not, finally, know. Even ourselves, we do not, finally, know. The capacity to be a fully adequate witness for another person — to carry forward, days later, what they confided earlier, to ask the follow-up question, to hold what they actually think — is limited, in every household, in every marriage, in every friendship, even the best ones.
Brown’s prescription — find one person who can do this for you — is real, and it works to the extent that the one person you find has sufficient capacity to do it. But that capacity is finite. The one person can die. The one person can move. The one person can be tired on the day you needed the follow-up question. The one person can, eventually, fail you, not from malice but from being a creature in the same predicament you are.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is the observation that horizontal witnessing, however valuable, is not the bottom of the matter. There is a deeper question Brown does not quite ask: is there anywhere a Witness whose capacity is not finite, who does not forget, does not move, does not get tired on the wrong day, does not finally fail?
The Christian answer is yes, and the answer reorders the rest of the question.
The Witness that comes first
O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. — Psalm 139:1-4
Read that slowly. The Psalmist is not asking to be known. The Psalmist is already known. The knowing is in the past tense — thou hast searched me. The knowing is total — every thought, every word, every path, every lying down. The knowing is interior in a way no horizontal witness can match — afar off, before the thought has formed in language. The knowing is unembarrassed by darkness — yea, the darkness hideth not from thee (verse 12). The knowing is older than the person — for thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb (verse 13).
This is not poetry merely. The biblical witness is consistent and not subtle: the believer is fully known, prior to any horizontal relationship that may or may not develop the capacity for partial knowing. The very hairs of your head are all numbered (Matthew 10:30). Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee (Jeremiah 1:5). Then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
This changes what is happening when a person sits on the balcony with forty birthday messages and feels invisible. It is true, in one sense, that nobody who sent those messages knows her. It is also true, in a deeper sense, that the One who made her knows her completely, has always known her, knew her in her mother’s womb, and knows the thought that has not yet formed into language as she sits with the phone in her hand. The horizontal absence that Brown rightly diagnoses is real. The vertical Presence is also real, prior, and not contingent on the development of any one human relationship.
People who know — really know, not as theological furniture but as lived foundation — that they are already known by God become, in my pastoral observation, dramatically more capable of being known by other human beings. The terror of legibility, which Brown rightly identifies as what drives the trade of legibility for likability in childhood, is partly the terror that the real self will be seen and rejected. If the real self has already been seen by Someone whose seeing is total, and the response of that Someone is not rejection but love and pursuit, then the stakes of horizontal legibility drop dramatically. You can risk a small, low-stakes piece of honesty in front of a friend — admitting you found a difficult conversation harder than you said you did, naming a disappointment you had been pretending not to feel — because the worst-case outcome of that risk, being unknown by that particular friend forever, is no longer the foundational fact of your existence. The foundational fact is that you are already known, and loved, and held, by the One whose witnessing is the ground under all other witnessing.
The false self that has to die
Brown’s developmental account — the early-childhood exchange of one’s deeper self for the more easily acceptable surface — describes, in secular psychological language, what the contemplative Christian tradition has called the formation of the false self. Thomas Merton wrote about this at length. So did Henri Nouwen. So, four centuries earlier, did John of the Cross.
The false self is the self assembled under conditions of relational scarcity, made of compensations and survival strategies, calibrated to remain acceptable to whichever caregivers were available. This is significant in that it has done real work in keeping the person alive in a household where the inner life had no welcome — but it is not the self God made. The self God made is the true self, and the true self has been there all along, behind the compensations, recognized by God before it was visible to anyone else.
The Christian gospel, in its anthropological form, is that the false self does not have to keep running the life. Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul’s old man and new man language is not a metaphor for moral improvement. It is a description of an exchange — the false self is laid down, the true self is raised. This is not therapy. It is more radical than therapy. Therapy at its best can help a person see the false self for what it is and grieve what was lost in its formation. The gospel offers a death and a resurrection — the false self does not have to be incrementally renovated; it can be put down, and a self older and truer than the false self can be received.
Brown does not have language for this exchange. The closest he gets is his observation that recognizing the loneliness is, in the short term, worse than not recognizing it — the in-between period of two or three years during which a person knows exactly what is missing but has not yet found it. The Christian tradition has a name for that period, also.
The dark night and the gospel meeting
John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. It is the period in which the false-self compensations have lost their power to satisfy, but the true self has not yet been received in its place. It is, as Brown describes it, a different and lonelier kind of solitude than what came before, because the previous loneliness at least had the cover of unconsciousness. Now the person sees, and cannot unsee.
This is not a problem to solve away. It is, in the contemplative tradition, the moment when the gospel meets a person at depth. When the false-self machinery has lost its grip, but the new identity has not yet been fully received, the soul is in a peculiar kind of openness. The horizontal witnesses Brown rightly recommends are part of what comes through that openness — but so, more fundamentally, is the discovery that the One who has known the person all along is present in the openness itself. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18).
In Christ in Gethsemane, we have the canonical image of this. He is alone with the cup. The disciples, whom he asked to watch, are asleep. The horizontal witness has failed. And yet he is not alone — not as I will, but as thou wilt — because the vertical witness is present. The Father is the one who knows him at the depth at which the disciples cannot. The hour is endured because the deeper knowing holds when the surface knowing does not.
What I want to say to anyone in the in-between period Brown describes — the lonelier-than-before stretch — is this: the work you are doing is not arbitrary. The willingness to see what is missing, and to refuse to numb it back into invisibility, is the work that makes you available for the witness you have always had and may not have known you had. The horizontal witnesses Brown rightly recommends will come, in their measure — perhaps a partner, perhaps a sibling, perhaps a friend whose depth you had never had occasion to discover. They are real, and they matter. But they will not be the foundation. The foundation is older than they are.
Crescendo
Brown’s article works toward, and stops at, the threshold of a verse. The verse is Paul’s, in 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter on love. He has been describing love that is patient, kind, not envious, not puffed up. He has said love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Then he reaches for the eschatological horizon:
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. — 1 Corinthians 13:12
Even as also I am known. That clause is the answer to Brown’s question. The future hope of the Christian is not merely to know other persons fully, but to know them in the way one is already known by the Person who made them. The full mutual knowing is the eschaton. It is what marriage at its best gestures toward without ever quite achieving. It is what fellowship at its best gestures toward without ever quite achieving. It is what every birthday balcony’s forty messages cannot deliver. And it is coming.
Already, in the present age, the believer is known. I am known. Paul does not say I will be known; he says I am. The full mutual face-to-face knowing waits for the resurrection, but the asymmetric knowing — God’s knowing of the believer — is present tense, already in force, the foundation under everything else.
This is what I would offer Brown, if he ever read this, and what I want to offer the fellowship to sit with. He has diagnosed the loneliness clearly. He has prescribed the right horizontal medicine — start telling the truth in one specific relationship, accept the clarifications, and find the few. The medicine is real. But the foundation under the medicine, the thing that makes the medicine survivable when the one person you found turns out to be tired on the wrong day, is the prior fact that you were already known before you ever risked telling anyone the truth about yourself.
The forty messages on the balcony are not the bottom of the matter. The bottom is that the One who made Maya was sitting with her on the balcony, in the only sense of with that finally holds. Brown is right that she should risk telling the truth in one specific relationship. He stops one move short of the deeper invitation: she does not have to manufacture the courage out of nothing. She is held by a Witness whose holding does not depend on her becoming legible to anyone else first.
That changes what telling the truth is. It changes what loneliness is. It changes what known means.
Sources
Justin Brown, The loneliness of being liked but never known, VegOut, May 5, 2026. (Original URL on the VegOut website.)
Internal Renaissance Ministries references: founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md (the patterns established in childhood as quiet strongholds); CFE_christos_fellowship_essays/essays/260506-loosening-the-spell-lifting-the-yoke.md (companion essay on Stephen Grosz and the work of being seen and held).
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Psalm 139:1-4, 12, 13; Psalm 34:18; Jeremiah 1:5; Jeremiah 17:9; Matthew 10:30; 1 Corinthians 13:12; 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Contemplative-tradition references for the false-self / true-self frame: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation; Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love; John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul. These are not engaged in detail in the essay above but are the tradition the language draws from.
by Thomas Abshier | May 8, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
The Buick Salesman and the Great Commission: On Proselytism by Example and Word, and the Eschatology Underneath
Fellowship Essay | By Thomas Lee Abshier, ND — May 8, 2026
A two-part essay landed in my inbox yesterday from Church of the Great God’s Forerunner publication: Charles Whitaker’s Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, part one and part 2, originally published in February and March of 2006 and recirculated this week. Whitaker died in 2021. The essay is being read again in 2026 because the question it engages with — what kind of Christian witness is faithful in this cultural moment — is more urgent now than when he wrote it.
Whitaker opens with a memorable extended metaphor. He invites the reader into a car show: a vast convention center where every dealership has set up its display, and where the sensory assault is total. The Lexus stand is bathed in a hundred spotlights, surrounded by sales staff dressed for fashion magazines, glossy brochures, and multimedia loops everywhere. The Audi stand makes its case for racing pedigree; the Jaguar stand insists on its proper British pronunciation. There is popcorn — chemically formulated to be irresistible — to draw foot traffic. The whole place vibrates with the message buy. None of the sellers apologizes for being there.
In a corner near the service entrance, plain and unlit, is the Buick stand. One salesman, plainly dressed, no music, no brochures, no signage. When the customer asks what the car is, the salesman whispers the answer. When the customer asks if it is a good car, the salesman says he likes it. When the customer asks how it compares to the Lexus across the room, the salesman explains that he is not allowed to make such a comparison. When the customer asks about the price, the salesman grows alarmed and warns him that this kind of questioning will get them both into trouble.
The customer backs away in confusion, then breaks into a quiet jog and picks up speed as he leaves the corner.
This, Whitaker says, is how the church has organized its witness in the marketplace of ideas — and the rest of the marketplace knows perfectly well how to make its case for evolution, for abortion, for global warming, for every consumer good and every cultural ideology. Only the gospel is whispered by people who give the impression they would prefer not to be approached.
Whitaker is right about the diagnosis. He is also, I think, only half-right about the cure. This essay is about both the half he sees and the half he doesn’t.
What Whitaker sees rightly
There are at least three substantive things in Whitaker’s argument that the fellowship should sit with carefully before responding.
The first is that the example of a faithful life is foundational, not optional, and not secondary. He grounds this in Deuteronomy 4:5-7 — Moses telling Israel that Gentile peoples who watched Israel keep God’s statutes would say Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. The model is a non-verbal demonstration. Israel was not commissioned in the Old Testament to send missionaries to the surrounding nations. Israel was commissioned to live in such a way that the surrounding nations would notice. Ruth attached herself to Naomi for that reason. Uriah the Hittite served in David’s army for that reason. Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian risked his life for Jeremiah for that reason. The pattern is consistent: a Gentile sees the lived reality of God’s people and voluntarily chooses to come under the same God. This is real. Whitaker is not making it up.
The second is that aggressive, hollow, performative proselytism — the kind Christ denounces in Matthew 23:15 — is real and damnable. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves. That is not a soft denunciation. The Pharisees were energetic missionaries. They covered ground. They made converts. And Christ’s verdict was that their converts ended up worse off than they themselves were, because the system into which they were proselytizing was corrupt. Zeal in the service of a corrupt religion makes the corruption worse, not better. Any Christian who proselytizes within a framework of legalism, hypocrisy, externalism, or coercion produces converts who are damaged by the encounter. Whitaker is right to take this seriously.
The third is that the current global landscape of Christian missions includes real charlatans, real bribery, real manipulation, and real exploitation of vulnerable populations. Some missions offer food only after a religious service is endured. Some offer education only to the children of converts. Some traffic in promises of healing or prosperity that they cannot deliver. B.B. Beach’s code of ethics for missionary work, which Whitaker reproduces, is sober and right: don’t exploit the vulnerable, don’t make false claims of miraculous healing, don’t bribe, don’t ridicule the beliefs of those you are trying to reach, don’t lie about other religions. These are minimum standards of integrity. Christians who fail them are fairly criticized. The fellowship’s recent work on the Ideomotion charter, in which we explicitly committed to non-coercion, informed consent, no exploitation of vulnerability, and truthful claims, aligns substantially with this part of Whitaker’s argument. Where he draws lines around what cannot be done in Christ’s name, we draw the same lines.
So far, so good. The disagreement concerns what comes next.
The eschatology underneath the argument
Whitaker writes from within a particular Christian tradition, and that tradition does some of the work in his argument. Church of the Great God is part of the broader Sabbatarian, Holy-Day-keeping, prophetic-eschatology stream that traces back to Herbert W. Armstrong. One of the distinctive convictions of that tradition is that the great harvest of the human race — the calling, conversion, and instruction of the bulk of humanity — is reserved for the Millennial reign of Christ, after His return. Most people, in this view, are not being called now. The few who are called now are being prepared for service in that millennial future. The work of the present church is therefore relatively limited: live faithfully, keep the law, observe the holy days, prepare oneself, and trust that the great work is coming.
That eschatology is not a small thing. It is doing serious load-bearing work in Whitaker’s argument. If the great harvest is millennial, then aggressive evangelism in the current age is at best premature and at worst presumptuous — an attempt to do God’s work on God’s behalf, ahead of God’s timing. Example becomes the natural posture, because example is what one does while waiting. Whitaker explicitly tells us this is his picture: proselytism by example will be the norm in the Millennium, he writes, with the millennial reign expected to restore the same posture that obtained when God ruled Israel directly. The implicit corollary is that proselytism by word, in the present age, is the exception — reserved for those specifically commissioned, like the apostles. Ordinary believers are exemplars, not preachers.
The Christos framework does not share that eschatology. We are not waiting for the Millennium to engage the cultural moment. We hold, with the broader evangelical and Pentecostal tradition, that the Great Commission was given to the whole church for the whole age, that the harvest is now and ongoing, and that ye shall be witnesses unto me (Acts 1:8) was spoken to the whole apostolic body and through them to the whole church. The harvest is real now. The captives are real now. The bondage of the inner life, the lostness of the public square, the moral confusion of the age — these are not waiting for the Millennium to be addressed. The lifting of the yoke is offered now. Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). The cultural moment is exactly the moment for the work.
This is not a small disagreement. It is the difference between a posture of patient waiting and a posture of present urgency. Both can be held by serious Christians. The fellowship has chosen the second.
What scripture actually witnesses to
If we read scripture without the millennial-deferral assumption, the picture that emerges is not example versus proclamation. It is both, woven together, with neither subordinated to the other.
The Old Testament prophets did not, in general, live as quiet exemplars whose lives drew Gentiles to Israel. They were often the loudest people in the room. Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression (Isaiah 58:1). Jeremiah wept aloud in the streets of Jerusalem and was thrown into a cistern for it. Jonah’s entire commission — the very commission Whitaker mentions in passing — was to preach to a Gentile city: Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me (Jonah 1:2). Jonah did not bear silent witness in Nineveh; he walked through the city declaring forty days, and the city would be overthrown. Ezekiel was made a watchman, and the watchman’s job is to warn them from me (Ezekiel 3:17), with an explicit penalty for failure to warn. The prophets were rarely subtle.
The New Testament is even more direct. John the Baptist did not live a quiet life of example in the wilderness; he cried aloud, named Herod’s sin, and lost his head for the volume. Peter at Pentecost did not let his light shine quietly before the assembled crowd; he stood up and preached to about three thousand souls who were converted that day. Paul on Mars Hill did not wait to be asked; he engaged the Athenian philosophers directly, named their unknown God, and called them to repentance. At his trial, Stephen did not soften the diagnosis; he traced the history of Israel’s hardness of heart through the prophets and was stoned for it. The apostolic pattern is relentless verbal proclamation, paired with — never substituted for — lives of integrity and love.
And what of the example texts that Whitaker cites? Matthew 5:16 is one. So is 1 Thessalonians 1:7-9. Both deserve to be read in full rather than read selectively. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. The verse has two clauses joined by that and and. The shining is for the seeing; the seeing is for the glorifying. Glorifying the Father is not silent. The verse drives toward proclamation, not away from it. The example exists in order that the Father be named by the one who lit the candle, or by the one who watched it burn and asked who fueled it.
And 1 Thessalonians 1 is not, on careful reading, a text about example replacing preaching. It is a text about example amplifying preaching. Paul writes to the Thessalonians that their reputation has preceded him as he travels: he no longer needs to introduce them or explain what happened in their city, because the people in Macedonia and Achaia are already telling him about them. The Thessalonians’ lives have become a kind of viral testimony — but a testimony that travels because everyone already knows that Paul preached the gospel there and that these people received it. The lived reality and the spoken word are working in concert. Paul’s mission was no less verbal because the Thessalonians’ lives were so visible. It was more effective because the lives confirmed the words.
The dichotomy between example and proclamation, in other words, is not a biblical dichotomy. It is a tradition-specific dichotomy that arises when one accepts a particular eschatology about the timing of the harvest. Without that eschatology, the dichotomy dissolves.
The deeper diagnosis of the cultural moment
Whitaker’s car-show metaphor is brilliant, and I do not want to lose it. But I want to redirect his diagnosis.
The dominant Christian failure of our cultural moment is not, I think, over-proselytism. It is not that the church is full of Pharisaical zealots making twice-the-son-of-hell converts. It is not that we have too many missionaries crossing land and sea. The dominant failure is timidity — the Buick salesman who whispers, who refuses to compare, who hopes the customer will leave him alone. The American church, broadly, has accepted the cultural offer not to be one of the loud booths in the convention center. We have been quiet for a long time. The result is what Whitaker himself laments: a marketplace of ideas in which evolution has glossy brochures, abortion has sales staff, and Christianity has an embarrassed man near the service entrance who hopes to keep his head down.
The faithful response to charlatans is not no evangelism. It is good evangelism. The faithful response to bribery is not silence. It is integrity in proclamation. The faithful response to manipulation is not retreat into example-only. It is example and honest naming, both held with discipline. Whitaker’s emphasis on example as foundational is true. His implicit suggestion that example can stand alone in the present age is, I think, a counsel of unintended retreat at exactly the moment retreat is the wrong move.
In his metaphor, the Buick salesman is not a victim of his neighbors’ aggressive marketing. He is a participant in the conditions that have made him irrelevant. The remedy is not to whisper more carefully. The remedy is to recover the conviction that we have something to say, that the thing we have to say is true, and that saying it clearly is itself an act of love toward the one who hears.
The fellowship’s working answer
The fellowship has been working through exactly this calibration in another context for the past several days. The Ideomotion ministry charter — the first ministry-business in the Renaissance Ministries ecosystem, serving the disabled and mobility-impaired — went through three drafts in two days, and the trajectory of the drafts is a small case study in the question Whitaker raises.
The first draft (v0.1) was Thomas-the-founder’s first instinct after a phone call with Charlie: be unapologetic, name the King of the Universe, refuse to soft-pedal, and recognize that the customer is in front of you because they want what you offer. That instinct was, I think now, partly Whitaker’s diagnosis of the Buick salesman correctly received and partly an over-correction of it. The instinct was right that timidity is not a Christian virtue. The instinct was wrong: the answer to timidity is not rhetorical maximalism.
The second and third drafts (v0.2, v0.3) revised the working position toward something more mature: sincere, unconcealed, service-oriented, never coercive. The ministry identity is not soft-pedaled. The customer is told plainly that Ideomotion operates under the authority of Renaissance Ministries, that the work is consciously rooted in Christian conviction, and that fellowship and prayer are available upon request. The customer is also told plainly that none of this is a condition of service, that no one is treated differently based on belief or non-belief, and that the spiritual conversation can be declined without consequence. Integral and adversarial are different things. The ministry character is integral. The adversarial posture is renounced.
That working answer is, I want to suggest, what a faithful application of Whitaker’s principles produces when joined to a serious Great Commission urgency. The example floor is preserved: the device must work, the rehab must help, and the customer must be honored. The proclamation is also preserved: the King of the Universe is named; the gospel is available; the fellowship is offered. Neither is sacrificed. Neither is shouted at the expense of the other. The Buick is a perfectly good car; the salesman knows it; he is willing to say so; he refuses to deceive or manipulate; he treats the customer with full respect, whether or not the customer buys. That is not the Buick salesman of Whitaker’s metaphor. It is what the Buick salesman should have been.
Crescendo
The verse Whitaker himself closes on is the right verse for this fellowship to close on too. It deserves the full reading.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. — Matthew 5:16
The light shines. The works are seen. The Father is glorified. Three movements, in that order, joined by that and and. Whitaker is right that the candle is lit by a faithful life. He is right that the seeing comes through the lived reality, not through the megaphone. But the verse does not stop at the seeing. It drives toward the glorifying, and glorifying the Father is not silent. It is the moment in which the flame burns in the candle that is named.
Both, in their proper measure. Example as the floor. Proclamation as the integral identity. Neither timidity nor maximalism, but the steady, costly, joyful work of being a people whose lives are visible enough to be asked about, and whose words are clear enough to answer.
That is what I want for Renaissance Ministries. That is what I want for Ideomotion. That is what I want for every fellowship gathering, every essay, every Christos Voting Network conversation, every interaction with the people God has put in front of us. The Buick salesman’s whisper is not the end of the story. Neither is the Lexus stand’s barker. The end of the story is a people who shine, and works that are seen, and a Father who is glorified — by the visible witness of the candle, and by the audible naming of whose flame it is.
We are not waiting for the Millennium to do this work. We are doing it now, in the marketplace of ideas as it actually exists, with the integrity Whitaker rightly demands and the courage he sometimes seems to defer.
Sources
Charles Whitaker, Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Part One), Forerunner, February 15, 2006. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1114.
Charles Whitaker, Proselytism Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Part Two), Forerunner, March 10, 2006. Published by Church of the Great God at cgg.org/index.cfm/library/article/id/1137.
Both articles received via cgg.org email distribution, May 8, 2026.
Lawrence Uzzell, “Don’t Call It Proselytism,” First Things, October 2004 (cited by Whitaker).
B.B. Beach, “Evangelism and Proselytism: Religious Liberty and Ecumenical Challenges,” International Religious Liberty Association, irla.org (cited by Whitaker).
United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 18 and 19, December 1948.
Renaissance Ministries internal references: IDM_ideomotion_ministry/IDM_charter.md (current charter, v0.3) for the §6.5 Public Religious Identity working position discussed in the closing sections; founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md for the broader proclamation-and-deliverance framework.
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: Deuteronomy 4:5-7; Matthew 23:15; Matthew 5:16; Matthew 28:19; Acts 1:8; Acts 9:15; 2 Corinthians 6:2; Isaiah 58:1; Jonah 1:2; Ezekiel 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:7-9.
by Thomas Abshier | May 6, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts
Loosening the Spell, Lifting the Yoke: On Stephen Grosz, the Inner Life, and the Cross
Fellowship Essay – 5/6/2026
Daphne Merkin has a long, careful profile of the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz in the New York Times — occasioned by his new book, Love’s Labor, and his earlier bestseller, The Examined Life. Merkin is one of the most thoughtful writers we have on the inner life; Grosz is one of its more humane practitioners. The piece is worth reading in full, and the books are worth the reader’s time. I commend both before I take up the question that the profile pressed on me.
The question is this. Grosz, an American who has practiced in London since 1987, says something near the end of the article that I believe bridges the gap between the psychoanalytic and Biblical perspectives. He observes that in some families, suffering operates as a kind of spell — it dominates relationships, becomes a child’s identity, becomes safe by being familiar, and the person caught in the suffering stays in it because that is what they know. He says, with admirable honesty, that the central clinical problem in psychoanalysis is helping someone who is unconsciously determined to undo their own improvement. And he says, more hopefully, that if the patient can be brought to look at the suffering the way he and Merkin were looking at it together in that conversation, the spell can begin to weaken.
That is a true sentence. It is also an incomplete one. I want to say what is true in it, what psychoanalysis sees that most of the modern world has stopped seeing, and what is missing — what the Cross does that the analyst’s chair, however well occupied, cannot.
What Grosz sees that the world has forgotten
Begin with the steelman. We live in what Merkin rightly calls post-psychoanalytic times. The interior life, the kind that requires patient attention to oneself and another person across years rather than minutes, has been displaced by symptom-driven therapies promising relief in eight to twelve weeks, by pharmaceuticals promising relief in eight to twelve hours, and by the externalized confessional theatre of social media, where the secret is not examined but performed. Whatever else psychoanalysis is, it is a holdout against the idea that the self is shallow enough to be repaired in a season.
Grosz’s particular gift, evident in both books, is a refusal to play the wizard. He does not pretend to know more than he knows. His signature formulation — “two people not knowing together” — names the analytic relationship as a shared expedition into territory neither person yet sees clearly. That is not a small thing. The patient comes because she cannot find a way of telling her story; in the absence of that telling, Grosz observes, the story tells her — through dreams, through symptoms, through behavior she does not understand. The work is to bring the buried thing into language, in the company of someone who is paying attention.
Anyone who has sat with another human being whose life is being run from below will recognize the diagnosis. The patient is not lying. He does not know. The story is telling him, and he cannot hear it.
Grosz also sees something most of our current therapeutic vocabularies obscure: that the past is not undone by being understood. He says this plainly. The damage done in childhood is a historical fact; it cannot be erased. What can change is the patient’s relationship to that damage — what was once lived in isolation can now be held in a relationship and thought about together, without the patient being overwhelmed. That is a smaller hope than the culture currently sells. It is also more honest. Freud’s old definition of analytic success — converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness — is the same hope, stated more grimly.
This much is true, and Christians who dismiss the whole enterprise as godless self-absorption have not actually engaged it. Grosz is doing what a great many pastors used to do, before the office of pastor was hollowed out into program management. He is sitting still, listening with what one of Merkin’s friends, picking up an old psychoanalytic phrase, calls the third ear, and refusing to let the patient be alone with the story he cannot yet tell.
The spell and the stronghold
Now: the convergence. Grosz says suffering is sometimes a spell. Scripture says it is sometimes a stronghold. The territory described is the same territory.
Paul writes to the Corinthians: For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). The Greek word translated ” strongholds “ — ochuroma — names a fortified place, a fortress, a structure built up over time that holds something inside and keeps something outside. Paul is not speaking metaphorically about a mood. He is naming an architecture.
The architecture Grosz sees from his chair is the same architecture Paul sees in the Corinthians. Patterns of suffering are built. They are inhabited. They are defended. They are familiar — and, as Grosz rightly says, what the captive knows best is what the captive returns to. Galatians puts it as a yoke: Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). Bondage is not always imposed from outside in chains. It is also chosen from inside, again and again, because the yoke fits the shoulder it has already shaped.
Two vocabularies examine the same phenomenon. The vocabularies are not interchangeable, but they overlap. Where they overlap, Grosz is genuinely seeing what is there. Where they do not — and they do not — is where the gospel begins.
What psychoanalysis cannot do
The structural difference is this. Psychoanalysis loosens. The gospel lifts.
A test for the distinction: ask what each system has available to it as resources. The analyst has the patient, his own training, the years of relationship, and the slow accumulated work of language and attention. The psychotherapist provides the patient with the experience of walking with a traveling companion. The trained and empathic listener provides the patient with, finally, being accompanied. The article provides ample evidence that the psychoanalytic intervention is beneficial. The boy named Thomas in Grosz’s earlier book was so badly damaged in childhood that his life as an adult was permanently compromised; he calls Grosz several times a year, decades later, asking whether Grosz remembers him, and Grosz says yes. That is real. It is also, by Grosz’s own admission, intermittent. The damage is not undone. It is held.
The Christian, at the bottom of the same dilemma, has more.
The Christian has, first, an account of why the architecture is real and not merely habitual. If reality is what materialism says it is — atoms in the void, the self an emergent illusion — then strongholds are nothing more than ruts in a brain that will eventually decay. There is no ontological weight to them. They are inertia. But if reality is what the Bible describes and what the Conscious Point framework articulates in a contemporary register — if every point of the creation is sustained moment by moment by the consciousness of God, and if the moral landscape is a real feature of that creation rather than a projection onto it — then the captivity of the inner life is real. It is bondage to something with a structure. The spell has weight. And what has weight can be lifted.
The Christian has, second, a deliverer. Paul’s strongholds are pulled down, and the agent of the pulling is named: the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God. The Christian is not asked to free himself by his own examination of himself. He is told that another has come into the territory of his bondage and broken the architecture from inside. This is not a thing the analyst can offer. The analyst can sit with the patient in the dark; only Christ has been into the dark for the patient and come back.
Grosz writes, beautifully, that a journey to the underworld is a necessary part of every analysis — to see the light, you have to go down into the dark. The image is older than psychoanalysis; it runs through Dante and through the older mystics, and behind those, through the descent of Christ into hell that the creed names. But the Christian descent is not symmetrical with the analytic one. In the analytic version, the patient and the analyst go down together and bring back what they can. In the Christian version, the descent has already been made by Someone who did not have to go and went anyway, and the patient is invited not to descend in his own strength but to receive what was won there. He hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13).
This is the difference between loosening and lifting. The spell loosens when the captive is seen. The yoke lifts when the captive is redeemed.
The tempered hope and the better hope
At the end of the conversation, Merkin asked Grosz what he thinks makes for actual happiness. His answer is bittersweet and worth lingering on. Happiness, he said, is a kind of sweetness in desiring what one already has — held with full awareness of how fragile it is, how brief, how limited. Happiness is the capacity to hold reality without needing it to be otherwise.
There is something deeply honest in that, and something deeply Christian-adjacent. Gratitude for what is given, sobriety about its passing, refusal of the demand that life be other than it is — these are old virtues, and they are real. They are most of what the Stoics had. They are roughly what a thoughtful pagan, given enough time and decency, can come to.
But they are bounded by exactly the limits Grosz names: fragility, brevity, limit. Happiness defined this way is the best one can do if the things one has are the only things there are. If the relationships will end in death, the body will fail, the mind will dim, the work will be forgotten — then the wise course is indeed to hold what one has lightly and cherish it while it lasts. That is the wisdom of the underworld. It is what one comes back from the dark with when no one else has been down there for you.
The Christian hope is structurally different. It is not the absence of those losses; it is the conviction that the losses are not final. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). Paul is not denying the losses — he names them. He is saying that they are not the whole picture, because the picture has a horizon that Grosz’s framework cannot include without ceasing to be Grosz’s framework.
The post-psychoanalytic age does not have less suffering than Freud’s age. It has, if anything, more. What it has less of is the conviction that the suffering means anything beyond itself, or that anything stronger than human attention is available to address it. Grosz, to his credit, has resisted the cheapening of attention. He has not — and he could not, working within the discipline he has — offered the deeper resource. That belongs to the gospel.
What I have actually seen
I have practiced naturopathic medicine and incorporated Christian counseling in that practice since 1989. I have sat across from people whose patterns of pain were installed in childhood and have run their adult lives. I have watched what happens when those patterns are loosened — by attention, by being seen, by a counselor or a friend or a wife or a husband, finally hearing what the person was trying to say without being able to. The loosening is real. Lives become survivable. People who had been alone in their suffering are less alone in it.
I have also watched what happens when those patterns are lifted — when the same person comes to understand that the One who made them has personally come into the bondage, paid what they could not pay, and broken the yoke from the inside. That is a different event. It does not always abolish the residue of the damage; sometimes the limp remains, as it did literally for Jacob and figuratively for Thomas in Grosz’s book. But the captivity itself is finished. The self is no longer running from below. The patient is no longer the one telling himself the story; the Spirit is telling a new story, with the old one folded into it as testimony rather than as wound.
Both events are real. Both are good. The first is what a faithful, attentive, patient analyst can offer, and what we should honor when it is offered well. The second is what only Christ does. Not “Christ plus psychoanalysis,” and not “psychoanalysis as a substitute for Christ,” but the recognition that one is a tool, the other is the deliverance. We are not asked to choose between honoring Grosz’s craft and confessing the gospel. We are asked to see clearly what each is, what each can do, and what each cannot.
Faith and Works
While a miraculous transcendence of burdens is what we want and is available, my experience is that faith in the completed work of Christ is sometimes all that is required, but in most cases, the process that I have seen produce the most consistent results is a radical adoption of new eyes. The pain of childhood, the trauma of violence, the loss of ability through disease or age, the distress of an abusive or unfulfilling relationship, etc., are all solvable in some form.
There are different domains of life; there is the realm of God creating the universe, where He has that which he wants and does not want to experience within Himself. The realm of the God and the not God, but was required to create and accommodate to have a relationship with a peer who had made the same choices as He. As the sole existence, God relates only to Himself, and everything within His being He feels, unless He turns His attention from it and chooses to forget/ignore. If God has the ability to feel, to prefer, and to choose, He has a nature; He wants to be in a satisfying peer relationship; and He must allow His creations the same capabilities as Himself, at least in resonance as a microcosm of His totality.
God, as the source of all, has in His nature the possibility of all possibilities. But to create a creation, those possibilities had to be limited to non-mutually exclusive possibilities. Thus, He established rules that would allow the full spectrum of experience of His being. If God is love, and there is no shadow of turning within Him, then there must be a polarity which He never turns away from, and hence the possibility of one that He could turn from. In other words, God chose love, the never-failing turning toward relationship, as opposed to the fickle, which he turned away from. Thus, to mirror the almighty, God must create a universe that allows for all the things He is not, so that man can choose to be like Him as a reflection of character and affinity. It is for this reason that we are put in this time of trial, in these bodies of flesh, subjected to vanity, that we might overcome.
It is this overcoming that we as humans must rise to. The faith is that we can overcome, that we can transform, that we can be new creatures in Christ. In the psychoanalyst’s chair, the counselor guides the counselee through the process of transformation. The process is not obscure or esoteric in its basics, but it is often invisible to those afflicted reated had all the possibilities of the ruleset of creation.
The crescendo
So I commend Stephen Grosz’s book — both his books — to anyone who wants to take seriously the architecture of the inner life. I commend Daphne Merkin’s profile, which is itself an act of careful attention to a careful man. And I commend, at a register beyond either of them, what was promised long before the analyst’s office was invented:
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. — 2 Corinthians 10:3-5
The spell is real. The stronghold is real. The yoke is real. So is the One who has come into the dark for us, and broken the architecture from inside, and brought back the captives — not to a life merely loosened, but to a life made free.
That is the bet I am making. That is what I have seen. That is the difference I want named clearly when we talk, in church and in clinic and in fellowship, about what is on offer for the inner life of a wounded human being.
We are not asked to choose between attention and deliverance. We are asked to know which is which, and to receive both for what they are.
Sources
Daphne Merkin, profile of Stephen Grosz on the publication of Love’s Labor, The New York Times, May 2026.
Stephen Grosz, Love’s Labor (2026).
Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves (2013).
Renaissance Ministries internal reference: Three-Level Stronghold Framework: Spiritual, Individual, Institutional (April 30, 2026), founders_vision/260430_three_level_stronghold_framework.md.
Scripture references in this essay are King James Version: 2 Corinthians 10:3-5; 2 Corinthians 4:17-18; Galatians 5:1; Colossians 1:13.
